Business transformation is the key to thriving in the modern market. Let's explore the four elements you need to understand in order to enable repeatable transformation.
Business transformation is the reality of the modern business world. As we experience constant cultural change, shifting consumer needs, and a turbulent market, embracing agility and adapting your business in whatever way it needs to change is the key to not just success, but survival.
Look at the business success stories of the last few decades. Once upon a time:
- Amazon sold books
- Netflix rented DVDs
- Nintendo supplied playing cards
Every successful enterprise has had to change their business model to meet the needs of the market. To thrive, you cannot stand still.
Often, transformation will involve a technology change; what we used to refer to as 'digital transformation', but these transformations often failed. Only 30% of digital transformations, such as cloud migration, would succeed, according to BCG.
This was because we only focused on the 'digital' side. Any digital transformation, however, must involve change across all aspects of your organization.
Just as winning a Formula One race involves both a car and a driver, growing your business requires both technology and physical change. Focusing on just the technology without also changing the rest of your business to match was doomed to failure.
To change your technology, you must take a holistic approach. As well as digital transformation, you must also:
- train your people to make the best of the new tech
- adapt your business model to online commerce
- market your new digital products to customers
- change your employee contracts to reflect decentralized working
- retire your obsolete technology to streamline your new business
- and much more
To learn more about successfully navigating a holistic business transformation, download our white paper:
WHITE PAPER: The Business Transformation Management Playbook
Building Transformation Into Your Architecture
This is why we now call digital transformation 'business transformation', as it concerns far more than just technology, and it's more important than ever. People inside and outside of your organization will simply not accept outdated technology:
- 49% of employees would quit their job if their workplace technology wasn't sufficient
- 73% of customers expect better personalization as technology advances
- 60% of data breaches are due to known and unpatched vulnerabilities and regulators will not accept this as an excuse
Offering an exceptional customer and employee experience, along with data security and regulatory compliance, is all essential. Maintaining all of that requires continually adapting your business to meet those standards.
So, how do you build easy agility into the fabric of your organization to enable you to pivot your operations in whatever way you need to in order to succeed? You need to have oversight of your entire organization in order to guide a comprehensive adaptation of all your technology and physical operations at the same time.
To make this easier, SAP has categorized all of these aspects of your organization you need to manage during transformation into four key areas. These aren't just areas that you need to work on during transformation, but aspects of your organization that you should maintain oversight of in order to accelerate all your transformations.
These four areas are the keys that unlock rapid, repeatable business transformation. Let's explore each aspect of this business transformation model and how you can leverage these four areas to build agility into the very fabric of your business.
Business Transformation Key 1: People
Business transformation has four aspects that all need to be transformed simultaneously in order to ensure success. The first is the most important resource that your organization can ever have: people.
You can invest in the most powerful, innovative technology imaginable, but it will all be wasted if your people don't use that technology. Likewise, monitoring the use of your approved software is pointless if your people are leveraging unauthorized software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools.
Ensuring alignment between your approved software toolset and what tools your people are actually using is crucial, particularly when you intend to change that approved list. If you buy a new software toolset and roll it out, but your employees continue to use your old toolset, then your transformation will be far from complete.
This is just a part of the reason why you need to have your people on-board with your business transformation. Another good reason is that your transformation will be accelerated and improved by the involvement of your users.
Your people are intimately familiar with their part of your business in a way that no-one else could be. Their expertise regarding their own areas of your business is incredibly beneficial to inform your work and ensure your new IT landscape has a functional fit with their daily work.
Involving your people in your transformation work as stakeholders will make your business transformation faster and more valuable for your organization. Ultimately, the goal of transformation is to allow your people to do their best work, so including them is key.
This is why SAP LeanIX enables you to create automated surveys of your users to complete your data on user behavior. Likewise, it can be beneficial to engage a digital adoption tool like WalkMe in order to support your users in leveraging your new technology.
Business Transformation Key 2: Processes
The second key to business transformation is what your people are actually doing. Empowering them to work more efficiently and effectively isn't beneficial if they are doing the wrong things.
Efficient business processes are the lifeblood of your organization and any transformation of your business must include an optimization of your operational procedures. To do that, you need to map your business processes and plan how you intend to redirect them after your transformation is complete.
Business process mining is key here. You need to keep a careful track on your current operations in order to ensure process parity after transformation.
This is where SAP Signavio(https://www.signavio.com/) comes in. Their Process Transformation Suite allows you to understand, pro-actively manage, and optimize your business processes to achieve the agility needed for successful change.
With accurate tracking of your business processes, you can road map your process transformation to support the use of your new technology and your new way of doing business. These new processes will then support your people and your new technology.
Business Transformation Key 3: Data
Business transformation requires information about your information. It's often been noted that data is the new oil, and you need to take it into account for your transformations.
Data was once limited to the application that contained it, with specific formatting. Sharing data among applications required integrations or duplications and reformatting.
To truly leverage Big Data and to enable the kind of rapid switching between IT architectures that business transformation calls for, you can't have siloed, formatted data. While the attention in the last decade has been on cloud migration and now artificial intelligence (AI), IT teams have been working in the background to free organizational data.
This process began with moving all your data into a universal format and a central location, known as a 'data lake'. This data now needs to be organized into a 'data warehouse' where it can be readily accessed and leveraged by any application.
Once this is in place, you can start leveraging smart data analysis tools like Collibra to surface deep insight into your organization to enable business transformation whenever you need it. You can even integrate these insights directly with SAP LeanIX.
Business Transformation Key 4: Applications
Now that your people, processes, and data have all been optimized for business transformation, you need to prime your actual technology for change. To understand how all your software applications are interconnected and reliant upon your IT components, you need to fully map your IT landscape.
SAP LeanIX(https://www.leanix.net/en/demo-eam) is a flexible toolkit for collaborative technology transformation, consisting of three world-class products built for ease of use and quick implementation:
- Application Portfolio Management - gain visibility on your application landscape, IT components, and business capabilities
- Technology Risk And Compliance - identify, assess, and mitigate technology risk in your IT systems
- Architecture And Road Map Planning - define your vision for your enterprise architecture, understand the impact of your transformations, and create actionable technology roadmaps to confidently navigate your business transformation.
Best of all, SAP LeanIX will align with the toolsets you use to monitor your technology, people, and processes to ensure your transformation is comprehensive and rapid. With this capability, you'll be able to adapt your business to whatever is to come in the future.
To find out more about how SAP LeanIX can enable business transformation, download our white paper:
