EQengineered 2022 Thought Leadership Series
Why Read This Green Paper?
High performance companies are actively engaged in digital and data journeys and are embracing flexibility, agility, and change as an ongoing and mandatory posture.
Who leads digital transformation at your organization?
Are you able to unlock new opportunities to grow your business?
Are you meeting the needs of your employees, customers, and partners?
Is your company prepared to become a data and digital enterprise?
Do you know where your data lives in the organization?
Are you ready to drive the future of your business proactively and measurably?
Over the past two years, most organizations have focused on demonstrating results through tactical strategies that reduce the cost of operations or eliminate legacy technology debt as a matter of survival. Leading organizations have been more strategic, leapfrogging the competition by setting a foundation for the digital and data-driven enterprise.
In this green paper, learn how the C-Suite can galvanize the team toward a proactive business direction that meets customers’ demands faster, delivers sustainable technology solutions, and defines data-driven ways of identifying critical decisions about new business opportunities to create differentiation and competitive advantage.
Executive Summary
Leading organizations have been attempting to prepare for a data-driven digital economy to make data and customer experience the core parts of their business strategy and operations. Irrespective of industry, companies are focused on using data to compete, improve the customer experience, create new business opportunities, and drive operational efficiencies.
Digital transformation initiatives assumed new importance in 2021 as all companies had to scramble to adapt to the new world impacted by the pandemic. What used to be decades long efforts turned into almost overnight imperatives for companies to survive. Although the pandemic dramatically accelerated digital transformations, these efforts were essentially rapid patchworks, quickly assembled from legacy components and processes, with a digital veneer. For most companies, implementation focused on “point solutions” and did not evolve corporate thinking to a new digital mindset. Given this, it will not be surprising if only a few of these initiatives turn out to be truly transformative.
There are many reasons for the lack of progress in transforming digitally and building a data-driven organization. Companies have to deal with legacy technologies, hard-to-change business processes and cultures, while at the same time confronting challenging business and competitive environments, a deluge of new technologies and tools, and difficulties hiring people with the required skill sets.
This green paper provides key recommendations for building and evolving an effective digital transformation initiative to enable the data-driven, customer-focused, digitally enabled enterprise which is responsive to both business and customer needs.
Introduction
The rallying cry for 2022 is, “Data. Customer and Employee Experience. Innovation.”
This is the age of analytics—information resulting from the systematic computational analysis of data to identify new opportunities, improve core processes, reduce operational costs, provide the best customer experience, remain competitive, and thrive in an increasingly challenging business environment.
Successful digital transformations enable organizations to:
Create a competitive advantage by fulfilling unmet needs and accelerating time to value,
Drive onboarding/adoption and engagement of the digital experience platform (DXP),
Deliver quality industry standard data and metrics,
Employ technology upgrades as a continuous and necessary response to industry or digital disruption, and
Reduce the lift on service teams.
Creating a corporate ethos/value system that equates the demand for superior customer experience to the requirement of future friendly technology in a business driven by data is a core challenge for organizations. The competing demands of speed, customer experience, and technical currency can be hard to navigate.
Success in digital transformation initiatives lies beyond just installing the right technology. Despite massive investments and multi-year efforts, organizations continue to struggle to derive value from these initiatives and arrive at a transformational business outcome.
It is essential to think in terms of multiple dimensions: agile processes, human experience, modular approach to application and data architecture, and the right technology architecture. Each of these areas can be bottlenecks to success. Robust designs will be undermined by underperforming technology implementations; likewise, a perfect implementation of the wrong experience will leave the user disappointed. Inaccessible or limited data can get in the way of an excellent experience design. When all the other parts are in place, a focused agile delivery is the key to ensuring the pieces come together correctly and deliver the anticipated value.
Agile Processes
Incorporation of an agile mindset is a core element of a successful digital transformation in all organizations. Even among the disruption caused by the pandemic, organizations that succeeded adopted an agile approach by implementing changes rapidly, evaluated them and adjusted them accordingly. Being agile does not simply mean implementing only a few well-known practices like Scrum and Daily Stand-ups; it means that organizations need to focus on rapid incremental thinking that allows adjustment while inspiring a culture of learning and adaptation by employees.
Where Agile methodology leans on flexibility to ensure the correct product is delivered, some of its process depends on the underlying stability of vision and purpose. Longer term roadmap and priority visibility helps the product owner and team to better select their short-term focus and understand how their work will affect the bigger picture. Metrics utilized to help steer and correct the agile process are most reliable when team structure is maintained, and repeated technical scenarios are encountered. Long term architectural vision is also key, helping empower Agile teams by allowing them to make technical decisions with full understanding of the consequences.
Above all, Agile relies upon people at every level. The most effective and efficient teams will tend to be ones whose skills and personalities gel. The interface between flat, self-managing teams and the reporting structures of the organization to which they belong relies on strong communication and leadership. Stakeholders, the cornerstone of the Agile’s ability to deliver on its value promise, must themselves have a clear understanding of where tactical imperatives meet strategic understandings.
By focusing on specific needs first, being Agile helps to provide tangible results and lower the risk of large-scale digital transformation activities, which might otherwise take months or years of investment before their value is seen.
From CX and UX to HX
All businesses are ultimately about customer experience and engagement. Most legacy processes tend to focus on back-office methods and applications, which are one step removed from end-users and clients. Organizations bringing in agile practices often tend to focus solely on the technical teams and processes, excluding the customers, employees, and users. Digital modernization involves focusing on a more human-centric experience (HX), going beyond the more traditional user (UX) and customer (CX) experience. The line is blurred between the digital and real world, and digital products are almost fully incorporated with everything we experience. This shift in focus allows organizations to create more value and tap into the multi-dimensional human experience.
A few guiding principles for building a human-centric experience are:
Know your audience
To create exceptional products and services, organizations must know their target audience, and their expectations and motivations. Without a deep understanding of user behavior, it is not possible to build successful products that can satisfy the needs of their users. User research, and user interaction data can help build user personas who represent the real audience.
Have empathy
Designing for the human experience requires organizations to have insight into actual human behavior instead of a hypothesis of that behavior. Organizations must see their users as real people, and recognize different people have different needs and expectations.
Be iterative
Use research and data interpretation as a springboard to design the human experience of your application. Early feedback and usability testing can inform the design and allow rapid course-correction.
Where experiences are driven and differentiated by application data, experiences can be affected by how well understood the data is at the outset of a project. Even when application data seems to point towards an intuitive feature, without the rigor of user research and testing it can be hard to know something truly valuable is being created.
Application & Data Modularization
Modern architectural and organizational thinking has been fundamentally changed by Eric Evans’s book Domain-Driven Design (2003). The idea of domain-oriented decomposition and ownership has become pervasive in implementing applications using a microservices architecture. The domain-oriented design techniques move away from centrally planned monolithic architectures, towards loosely coupled autonomous applications.
Splitting application code into discrete chunks is a core theme of modern architecture. A strongly modular architecture increases responsiveness to business needs while reducing the need for global changes. It focuses on separation of concerns, with clean, separate layers front to back, containing user and service interactions, business logic, storage, and infrastructure, as shown below:
In the data world, however, these ideas have been slower to percolate. Most organizations are still structured around a centralized ownership and governance model across the enterprise, with a data architecture consisting of operational data stores feeding into a central data warehouse and fronted by BI and reporting tools. The introduction of newer technologies and platforms like internet-scale systems, migration to cloud computing, ML/AI based analytics, IoT (Internet of Things), and edge devices like smart phones have necessitated fundamental shifts to the data architecture to meet the enhanced requirements for scalability, consistency, and disaster recovery.
Organizations can be more responsive to business needs by applying the following steps to application development:
1. Identify the domains involved and assign ownership to the domains
2. For each domain, identify its core entities and define interactions with them
3. Model data, and design the interface specific to a domain
4. Integrate domains cross-functionally using the interface (APIs)
5. Iterate, test, repeat
Technology Architecture
The continuities required by digital transformation are provided by defined goals and approaches, and these are as important in technology architecture as in visual design systems. A cloud-based technology architecture aligned with future vision allows platform growth to flow from project to project in a continual motion.
The digital transformation journey has many steps and can only be executed effectively when the program is well coordinated. Architecture needs to grow along with an organization, and its current state should be articulated in a place and form which can be consumed by a variety of stakeholders. Tightly focused project or sprint goals can be achieved with the knowledge that they do not weaken longer term goals. Developers working in specific products, or specific modules of a modularized architecture, should not lose sight of the big picture.
An organization governed by a coherent technology architecture can answer key questions such as:
What technologies, languages, and products do we currently use or plan to use? Why?
How do the overlapping data models of the organization come together and what plans already exist for new usages of them?
What are the external and cross-functional interactions between the business domains?
Is there clean separation of concerns between the various layers of the architecture?
Which processes need transactional level data integrity with one another?
Which systems must be synchronized in real time, and which can be made consistent over time?
Have the various non-functional concerns like security, scalability, performance, and disaster recovery been identified and addressed?
Conclusion
The demands of digital transformation keep growing as industry norms shift and higher standards are required. To meet these goals requires a deliberate synthesis of informed approaches to human experience (HX), data and application engineering, and agile processes.
Although the disciplines behind the components of digital transformation are intricate, the interplay between them should be simple to explain. It is important that high-level organizational principles are established and communicated proactively as an overall strategy, rather than reactively addressed to cure isolated symptoms.
Insights | Takeaways
Leading enterprises have already changed in meaningful ways. To compete, organizations will need to:
Assess and transform their cultures from ones of fear related to change, interruption, and disruption (from technology and data/analytics/AI), to a posture of candor, interoperability, and learning/re-skilling across the organization.
Radically shift to break down silos, honestly assess skill sets, and plan for change ahead as a renewed, cohesively led organization, and one that may have to partner externally with ecosystem capabilities.
Embrace their data moment: the moment they realize data is mainstream, the corporate lifeblood, and the forward direction to ensure the long-term viability, and value proposition, of the evolving organization. Data architecture should empower experiences and bind disparate applications and data domains together.
Adopt Agile processes to deliver the long-term vision as well as individual projects with an architectural direction that is accessible and broadly communicated.
Forward-leaning organizations have embraced the opportunity to accelerate digital transformation to advance beyond their competitors over the past two years. Looking at the enterprise strategy through the lens of data and digital enablement to align with the way in which customers interact and employees’ live (lifestyle) has created tangible results.
All organizations will follow course to meet the forces of change and disruption or be interrupted by those that do.
References
Domain Driven Design. URL: https://www.domainlanguage.com/ddd/
Modern Data Architecture - A Data Modernization Green Paper. URL: https://www.eqengineered.com/insights/modern-data-architecture
Embrace Modular Technology & Agile Process to Deliver Business Impact (Parts 1—5). URL: https://www.eqengineered.com/insights/embrace-modular-technology-and-agile-process-to-deliver-business-impact-part-1
Building Software with Empathy. URL: https://www.eqengineered.com/insights/building-software-with-empathy
Authors
Mark Hewitt – President & CEO
Mark is a driven leader that thinks strategically and isn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves and get to work. He believes collaboration, communication, and unwavering ethics are the cornerstones of building and evolving leading teams. Prior to joining EQengineered, Mark worked in various management and sales leadership capacities at companies including Forrester Research, Collaborative Consulting, Cantina Consulting and Molecular | Isobar. Mark is a graduate of the United States Military Academy and served in the US Army.
Julian Flaks– Chief Technology Officer
Julian is a relentless problem solver and hoarder of full stack expertise. Having thrown himself headlong into Internet technology when best practices had barely begun to emerge, Julian is happiest putting his experience to use unlocking business value. Julian holds a Bachelor’s of Laws from The University of Wolverhampton, England and a Master of Science in Software Engineering from The University of Westminster.
Ranjan Bhattacharya – Chief Digital Officer
Ranjan is passionate about building technology solutions aligned with business needs, intersecting data, platform, and cloud. He is a believer in delivering value incrementally through agile processes incorporating early user feedback. Outside of technology, Ranjan loves to read widely, listen to music, and travel. Ranjan has a BS in Electrical Engineering, and an MS in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India.
Anne Lewson – Principal Consultant | Project & Program Management Leader
Anne blends technical with practical approaches to deliver projects ranging from large data mergers to more detailed, analytical solutions for a wide array of internal and external stakeholders. Anne leads the project management practice by using an applied Agile methodology suited to our clients' requirements. Anne has a B.S. in Computer Technology/Computer Systems Technology from University of Nantes and has her PMP and PMI-Agile certification.
Rachael Guay – Principal User Experience Designer | Design Practice Leader
Rachael cultivates smart digital experiences. Her passion lies at the intersection of technology and human-centered design. She is a problem solver that satisfies both business and human needs. Rachael’s experience includes designing experiences for native apps to large-scale enterprise web applications and many things in between for financial, consumer electronics, entertainment, biologics, informatics, and healthcare sectors.