Business transformation is a vital, but little understood part of modern business. Let's explore five repeatable steps you can take to transform your technology along with your business.
Business transformation isn't a new concept. It's simply the need to adapt your organization to cultural and technological change.
If you remember:
- Amazon was once a book seller
- Netflix used to offer DVD rental
- Nintendo used to be a playing card company
- Apple only made computers
- It was once considered radical for Disney to open a theme park
Just as humanity needed to evolve to become the dominant species on the planet, enterprise needs to constantly change in order to survive. As the evolution of technology and culture continues to accelerate, the repeated transformation of your entire business is becoming a priority.
As ServiceNow CEO, Bill McDermot told CNBC :
"What's happened is digital transformation has really turned into business transformation. How do companies deflect the pressure from their people using digital technology? How do companies avoid having employees swivel-chair between 13 applications, on average, a day, burning up 33% of their productivity? And now, how do companies take generative AI to completely rethink the game in terms of their business processes?"
Yet, often-quoted Boston Consulting Group research shows that 70% of these transformations fail. This is often because organizations don't take a holistic approach to transformation.
The thought process is simply 'let's change our email system' or 'let's migrate to the cloud'. Instead, organizations need to think through all the different impacts that the change will have on their entire IT landscape and business infrastructure, including their people.
To support you, we've put together a complete playbook on how to widen the scope of your transformations to consider all the factors. Download a copy now:
Free White Paper: The Business Transformation Management Playbook
What Is Business Transformation?
Business transformation is the holistic process of adapting your organization to cultural and technological change. It could involve a digital transformation, like migrating to the cloud, or updating your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system; a physical one, such as moving offices or restructuring; or an organizational one, like adapting to a new line of business.
Whatever kind of business transformation your organization needs to undergo, success will be reliant on considering all aspects of the change. Whether your transformation is physical or digital, you need to transform your technology and your business together.
Focusing only on your technology without considering the impacts to your people and processes, or focusing on your business, without updating your IT landscape to match, will both lead to failure. To succeed and thrive, businesses need a simple, repeatable process to mirror their business transformation across both aspects.
The key here is "repeatable". One business transformation will never be enough to continue to adapt to a constantly evolving market.
Business transformation can't be a one-off initiative. You need to adapt your business to a culture of continuous business transformation and make change an everyday business process.
To help you, we've put together a five-step process for business transformation.
Business Transformation Step 1: Discover
Business transformation is a complex process, and you need to map out your path before you take a first step. Before you think about where you're going, however, you need to know where you are.
Ask yourself:
- How does your business run?
- What business processes do you follow?
- Who does what in these processes?
- What technology do you require to run them effectively?
- What technology can you do without?
Creating a comprehensive overview of your business processes and IT landscape as they currently exist can itself serve as a valuable exercise and a critical starting point for transformation. Often, seeing where your current pain points are will make the next steps you need to take obvious.
Business Transformation Step 2: Analyze
The business transformation process is not a straightforward one. There are plenty of pitfalls to avoid along the way, and there's additional value to be acquired if you have your wits about you.
This is why it's vital to ensure your understanding of your as-is estate and your vision for the future are comprehensive. Your vision for your post-transformation state can't just be a list of software applications and business processes, but must also document how these will interact and support one another.
A full understanding of your IT landscape will allow you to unpick your tech stack and put it back together in a new state with new parts, without breaking anything. Not to mention, you'll have the full support of a prepared team of stakeholders along the way.
Step two of your business transformation should, therefore, be to analyze and deepen your understanding of your current state and your vision for the future. Together, you can use these models to plan your route through your business transformation.
Business Transformation Step 3: Design
Business transformation is a journey and the most-important part is planning your route. Using your deep analysis of your IT landscape and target state, you can plot a path from one to the other.
You should start with a list of your business goals and a vision for what it would look like to achieve them. You can then create a list of requirements for the processes, systems, and tools that would need to be in place to support your IT landscape in your vision.
Applying your understanding of your current tools, you can then document the steps you need to take in order to reach your goal and complete your transformation. This should include timescales and a list of responsible parties.
With a considered plan in place, your business transformation can be carried out confidently without any surprises. All that's left now is to follow your design.
Business Transformation Step 4: Implement
A comprehensive plan makes business transformation not only achievable, but repeatable. Working to a road map, you can reach your ideal state and prepare yourself for another success in your next transformation.
It's vital, however, to remember to keep all your stakeholders informed and engaged in the process so that they're ready to make the most out of your new IT landscape. This will require ongoing support, training, and guidance.
When your business transformation is complete, you should have a plan in place to empower your people to hit the ground running. This ensures you'll gain maximum value from your business transformation.
Business Transformation Step 5: Operate
Business transformation is a repeated process, but it should not be a constant. Remember that changes are made to enable your operations, not disrupt them.
When your business transformation is complete, your focus should be on ensuring that your project has benefitted your organization and empowered your work until the next transformation needs to be carried out. The only way to know this has happened and to take learnings forward into your next initiative is to monitor your operations and confirm success.
This requires careful monitoring of your estate and collaboration with stakeholders, which conveniently brings you back to the discovery step above. This means that the key to business transformation is a tool that can constantly assess and monitor your IT landscape.
How SAP LeanIX And SAP Signavio Help
Business transformation, as we have seen, is about detailed comprehension of your IT landscape, application portfolio, and business processes. That's why the combination of SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio is so powerful.
SAP LeanIX offers automated landscape discovery of your application portfolio, as well as the option to easily import data from Excel. Our platform has an integration with SAP Signavio, which allows you to synergize and link your application data with the business process information gathered by Signavio.
Both tools enable deep analysis of your technology and business processes. They also allow you to design your ideal state and road map a path to get there.
Finally, the fact that you can add as many users as you wish to your instance of SAP LeanIX means that you can share all your application information with anyone you wish throughout your organization to keep them informed on your progress and success. This information will also remain available to inform future transformations and prove the value of your efforts.
To find out more about leveraging SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio for you business transformation efforts, download our business transformation white paper:
