Strategies Towards Successful Data and Digital Transformations | Digital CxO Summit

Welcome. Thank you for joining me today as I share some strategies for you, uh, to secede when you're engaging in your digital or data transformation. My name is Sandy Estrada.

I'm a vice president at Veo, um, a Kearney company. I've been in the data and analytics space for two decades, helping Fortune 500 companies with digital and data programs and transformations. My experience has led me to financial services, life sciences, CPGs, across the number of functions and domains within those organizations.

I, um, truly believe that diversity of thought is crucial for overcoming challenges across digital and the data AI landscape. It's really about understanding individuals and where they're coming from. So that's really what I mean by diversity of thought.

I think that's key to success, and you're gonna hear a little bit about that today. Outside of work, um, I am, uh, often looking at, um, planning my next vacation to a national park. I have a goal of hitting off 50, uh, at some point in my life.

I spend a lot of time in the, in the White mountains of New Hampshire. I live in Boston, and when I'm not in the office or working from home at, at the Pottery studio, uh, trying to create functional forms out of clay, I'm also involved in a number of organizations, uh, specifically helping women. Uh, within the data domain.

I often find myself telling my clients that transformations are a balancing act in terms of what an organization wants, what an organization can afford, and most importantly, what it can endure. And the reason why I say that is because organizations tend to over index and, um, spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about technologies to enable a digital transformation or to enable a data transformation. And what we're finding is that they're not spending enough time on the other parts of the equation, the people in the process.

And that's really where your endurance comes in. And I'm not alone in that. Um, Gartner recently surveyed chief data officers and asked them about their agenda.

This happened in early 2023, actually, probably towards the end of 2022. And in that survey, they asked the chief data officers, what are some of the critical barriers to meeting your agenda? And what we found was actually quite surprising to a lot of people.

It wasn't surprising to me. The top 10 responses included these six. And, um, it, if you look at this list, it's really skills and staff shortages, lack of resources, lack of business, stakeholder involvement, not enough authority to execute responsibilities, culture challenges, and poor data literacy.

What that tells us is that organizations, again, are really focused and capable in delivering technology, but what they're not focused and capable of is handling change from a people and process standpoint. And why is that? It's because organizations often over index on execution.

And what we're asking people to do is think outside of that and think broader. Um, when you're going through a transformation, there are really four key areas you need to think about. First is envisioning.

Do you have the right strategic business goals identified in your transformation? And I'm not talking about a strategic goal. Um, I often hear, for example, in finance transformations, I hear organizations tell me they want to get down to a one day or two day close.

That's not a strategic outcome. Everything you get out of a one or two day close is a strategic outcome. And that's really how you should envision really figuring out what are the business, uh, you know, success factors here in order to get what I want.

On the engagement side, organizations are not thinking about how to align and team and what the dependencies and shared outcomes really are. They're doing it at a very topical level. Um, so I'm gonna share some strategies in terms of how to get that a little more there.

And last but not least is on the enablement side, creating operating models to truly enable sustainability of the capability you're creating. When it comes to digital and data transformation, you're not actually just implementing technology, you're actually building a capability. You need to think about this a little differently than maybe implementing an E R P, for example, and that sometimes gets away from people.

So there are some strategies there, and I plan to share with those, what those are today. And then on the execution side, yes, organizations execute fairly well, but there's price and tweaks that need to happen. So how to think about this.

I typically ensure that I can answer the following four questions when I'm in a transformation. And if I cannot answer these questions or answer yes to them, then I probably have a problem with my hands that I need to diagnose. So for today, we're gonna solve these four questions through specific strategies on how to answer them.

Um, and that's really where I'm gonna spend my time. What are the four questions? The first one is, who are we?

Do you really know who you are? Who is the organization in terms of that capability? Who are the people involved in that capability that you're trying to transform?

How do they work? And what is it that they do? You really need to have that basic level of understanding of your business.

Number two, are we aligned? This is not a one-time question. This is an ongoing question and I'm gonna share why.

Number three is, are we realizing value? Oftentimes these transformations take a long time. We're talking years.

Sometimes I just haven't seen a transformation go over six under six months. So are you realizing value is something you should be asking often? And if you're not, you need to find ways to pivot.

And we have some strategies for how to pivot and when to pivot. Um, last but not least, are we setting up for sustainability? And that goes to the endurance question.

Are you creating a capability that you can sustain or are you just implementing a technology? Um, if you can't answer that question, then you probably have something to double click on. So let's get started.

Who are we? Serena Williams answered that question for herself constantly. She once said, understanding your past gives you insight into your strengths and the ability to learn from your weaknesses.

Serena is one of the best, and I constantly think about about, uh, her and I think about just the way, um, an organization really needs to understand themselves. How did you get where you are today and what is it that you're doing, and what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses? So my first strategy is ensuring that you conduct a current state assessment prior to executing a transformation.

What does this look like? There are many, many frameworks out there. You can Google it, you can ask chat, g b t many.

At the end of the day, you're gonna wanna look at three things, and I'm sharing the framework that we use at our firm right now, um, primarily to give you some structure. So one part of the framework is how an organization thinks about that capability. In this case, how do they think about creating business value?

Is there a mandate? Is there a vision? Do they often look at this?

What is the culture around that capability? What are the objectives that they, they're seeking to achieve? Is that laid out?

Um, we're trying to look at the culture there and trying to look at how the, the organization thinks about that. On the build side, it's really about capability, right? So you're thinking about how does an organization leverage the technologies they have?

Is it governed? Is it accessible? What is the quality of the data or the platform, et cetera.

Um, so we're looking and double clicking on all aspects and domains in that area. And the third piece you wanna look at when you're doing a current state assessment is the operating model. Again, that goes back to the endurance and the capability build.

What is your organizational structure? What are the ways of working? What does the service portfolio look like?

What kind of services are you giving to the business? Is it just technology or is it learnings? And what are the ways that you're enabling your team and your business partners, um, to gain skills?

So those are things that we're probably looking at. The only other thing I'll say on this beyond, hey, you need to conduct a current state assessment, is you might want to leverage somebody from an outside in perspective that's, you know, rich coming from a consultant, right? Use consulting services to get a current state assessment.

I say this because the reality is consultants are gonna look at things with a different eye and they're gonna think about what they've seen in the past at other organizations and be able to shed some light in areas of perhaps the team members you have in staff may not have that historical understanding or knowledge of. So you definitely wanna have an outside in perspective when conducting a current state assessment. Next up, are we aligned?

Uh, pat Riley, one of the best, n b a coaches out there. He coached the Lakers, Nicks and, uh, Miami Heat. I was a Knicks fan when he was a coach there, so I know him pretty well.

Um, he once said, when a team aligns its actions with a common purpose, extraordinary achievements becomes possible. Now, if you think about what a coach is doing, especially, um, a professional coach, uh, of a sports team, they're dealing with celebrities at the end of the day, they're dealing with, with superstars, individuals who make money beyond compare. They don't need to listen to their coach.

So how does a coach get buy-in? They get buy-in by, in, by, um, helping the individual understand what the vision enables them to do as individuals, as well as it enables 'em to do for their teams. And I think when you're going through a transformation, you kind of have to take the same perspective.

And why is that? Why do I need to work on this? Buy-in.

First and foremost, transformations take time. As we discussed, it's not gonna be a six month initiative, it's over years. It also requires cross-functional engagement.

And during this time, you are gonna have attrition. There's gonna be people who leave the organization, new people are gonna come in, and you're constantly needing to have to get buy-in from every individual. And when I think about cross-functional engagement, what's critical there is the reality that every part of the function, every part of an organization, every function within an organization may have different things that they're trying to achieve within a year, within two years, within three years.

And it may, it needs to be aligned to that transformation vision. If you don't have that alignment, you're gonna, you're definitely set up for failure. Who's involved?

Well, not only just the impacted teams, but the teams that partner with those impacted teams, the teams that support those impacted teams. And it's not just executives. You wanna look at everybody from operators all the way up the chain.

Um, and you wanna get them involved. You wanna get their buy-in. You don't have to get detailed buy-in, but you need to understand how to get their buy-in from a themes perspective.

So how do you get that? We often say you take a three step approach, you start with surveys, you blanket everybody with a survey in terms of how they think about that transformation, you're about to engage. Um, the survey needs to be structured in a way where you can look at all the current assessment standpoints from, you know, how do they think about that capability, how they think about the technology related to that capability, and how they think about the operations related to that capability.

Just to get a sense for, am I serving the operators correctly, um, or the analysts within my my teams? Am I serving the executives correctly? Then you wanna conduct interviews from mid-tier up just to really understand some of the specifics related to those trends.

And then you wanna have workshops with executives to ensure you have overall buy-in. Sounds simple. It's not.

It does take time. The other thing I'll say on top of that is that you get no buy-in without compromise. There's always compromise when it comes to buy-in, uh, very much like, uh, the American government.

There's a lot of compromise that goes into play. Now, I'm not saying anything new here. Everybody does this impact versus feasibility approach when it comes to needs of the organization.

But what I am gonna tell you is that what a, where a lot of people fail at this is they do not create dimensionality to why did you set something as a high, medium or low impact? And why did you set something as a high, medium, low fe feasibility? You need to be able to communicate the reasoning behind that.

And in order to do that, you need to have certain dimensions that you wanna qualify things for. So for impact, these may are just sample, uh, dimensions you might, might wanna leverage. Is there a cost reduction associated to this?

Is it gonna generate revenue? Is it a good strategic fit for the overarching need that we have as an organization? Um, from a feasibility standpoint, you might, uh, score it off of certain dimensions like data availability, sophistication, ease to implement, those kind of things.

My point here is you wanna document those dimensions and ensure that they're standardized across impact and feasibility. And that as you are, um, scoring items, you're scoring 'em in a way that everybody can understand and you can always reference back to them. The other thing I'll say about this is that I've seen a lot of organizations do this once and not repeat that later.

So my point here is, as you go through this transformation, you're gonna find that things become more feasible over time, especially if you're taking a roadmap approach that is iterative. So do this once, do it across dimensions and revisit the scoring over and over again because things may become easier to achieve. They may have high impact.

Babe Ruth, oh, are we realizing value? Babe did this often. He once said every strike brings me closer to the next home run.

So he understood that he could learn from failures, and I think a lot of organizations, uh, may not understand that. Um, failure is not failure unless you stop working, right? So how do I ensure I'm learning from the process that we're undertaking, even if that process is going sideways?

And oftentimes I tell my clients, Hey, people are impatient. So you're gonna wanna deliver early and deliver often. So how do I do that in a long-term roadmap?

You do that by structuring your roadmaps around quarterly release schedules. You wanna ensure your roadmap enables you to see what is happening. Does this item actually help the business?

Uh, does this item actually make sense to everybody? What I'm releasing is that enabling us as an organization and it gives you the ability to understand how you have to make operational changes to support what you're releasing into the world. Um, this is really hard to execute.

I think organizations often attempt to do this, but what they fail at is ensuring they have the operational support to support the item that they're releasing. Um, so that's something to always think about. How does this look?

So the reason why you wanna do a quarterly schedule is you want to take a test and learn approach to your delivery model. What this enables you to do as an organization is to pause and quickly iterate based on learnings and be prepared to dish ideas that they don't prove valuable. So what this looks like day to day is you're releasing minimal viable products as your first output.

And that minimal viable product is something that is going to allow you to get something out the door. It's end-to-end, uh, capability, right? It, uh, you bring, you're bringing data in, you're creating digital assets, and you're releasing those digital assets that work in production.

Um, but it may not have all the bells of whistles, all the functionalities you ultimately want to achieve. And why are you doing this? You're doing this to have a learning cycle in a pivot cycle.

And if you do this well on a quarterly basis, you then have the ability to pivot. Um, so here's a diagram for, to give you a quick example. So let's say you have an M V P execution that you put out into production, and the next, uh, the next thing on the backlog was, Hey, I'm gonna actually build an integration to core systems of this capability where data is flowing back and forth to my core systems.

Or perhaps I go from my system to another system, um, in an integrated fashion. If that system itself isn't working, that integration that goes away, you probably have to go revisit the system itself. But if that system is working, that integration that gets a green light, you move on to that part of your journey and at every point in time you get to pivot.

So it's really just the idea that, hey, you don't want to do an end-to-end thing. You really wanna get the core of it right? And then think about how do I add those bells and whistles along the way so that I can make this transformation really work for the business.

Last but not least, are we set up for sustainability. And I rushed through the beginning of this primarily 'cause I wanted to spend a lot of time here. Again, this is really, uh, about endurance.

And Vince Lombardi, uh, couldn't have set it better individual commitment to a group effort. That's what it takes for a teamwork, a company to work, a society to work in, a civilization to work. And I couldn't agree more.

So how do you get individuals to commit to a group effort? How do you structure things in a way that everybody wins and everybody is, uh, you know, focused? And I think that, um, I, I, you know, and I hate, I hate hearing the term digital natives, but I will say, um, digital natives have this covered.

Um, and it's really about adopting operational effective effectiveness strategies. And I have a few that digital natives have done, um, that, you know, they're very selective items that I'm laying out here primarily to help you understand what is the extra that happens, uh, that makes this all work when the, when you're building a capability versus just delivering a technology. So when you're delivering a technology, it's really about do I have an administrator?

Maybe a couple people around it to ensure that technology is working. But when you're delivering a capability which requires multiple technologies, potentially bespoke capabilities, you really wanna have a framework to enable the subject matter experts and the very specific skill sets you need to run that capability to be really good. You also wanna ensure that that capability holistically serves the entire organization.

Um, and being able to do those two things is really challenging. So here are some key, uh, strategies that digital natives enable to, to make that work. First is how they handle capability and talent development.

Um, I actually have a story here, uh, 20 years ago when I started my career about 22 years ago now actually, I, I worked for a digital consulting firm and that was in a dotcom era really when the bubble was about to burst, it was just a few months before the bubble burst. And I still remember this. I came in, I was put on a project and uh, I was one of two individuals with a very specific specialty.

We had over a hundred engineers on this program and I was one of two that did JavaScript development. And um, therefore I was right outta college. I only had one other person to learn from, or at least I thought what this organization did was quite different in terms of ensuring that I was supported.

We had weekly meetings that lasted two hours with all JavaScript developers at the organization. There were about 25 of us. We met for two hours a week and talked about our challenges, talked about any kind of code issues we were having, talked about our goals as individuals.

And within a couple of months I was just as good as everybody else at the org who had been there for years. And I will say that that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't created that network within the organization. This capability applies at digital natives.

They actually take specialists and help them create communities where they can share ideas, learn from another one another, and have a network within the organization, even if they're working on very disparate solutions. I think this is something that anybody can employ, but it does require some support from your talent group within your organization or even the organization itself to create this this community. Number two is a platform mindset.

So a platform mindset is really again, about the reality that you're not just creating technology and implementing technology, you're creating a bespoke solution. So what does this mean? Having a platform mindset.

It means you're gonna have a team that's actually focused on the enablement of the platform. They're building capabilities on the platform that the rest of the organi organization can leverage. Let me give you an example.

Let's say that the organization has, uh, uh, you know, batch processing needs of data. Well, how a batch process works, how you schedule a about batch process that can be built through the platform team and that platform team is going to perhaps create a digital capability in front of that to mask the coding behind creating a new batch script match the coding behind scheduling a batch script math ma uh, mass, the coding behind being able to get alerts from that batch script that's happening through the platform team. Now think about the, the leverage you get with that, right?

This platform team is creating capabilities that other teams can leverage. You now have product teams that are actually focused on creating value for the business and are not focused on technical capability. This really creates a lot of leverage with an organization.

So what is my number three item? Product teams. They're the ones leveraging the capabilities of the platform team has created.

So product teams are really focused on understanding product domains. So I'll give you an example and data, it's actually really easy. Um, when you're thinking about data teams, data product teams are gonna be focused around business domains.

So you might have a sales data product team, you might have one focused in marketing, you might have focus on a specific part of the supply chain, et cetera. And they're really focused in understanding the business under understanding the data sources for that business, the values, uh, areas of that business, and creating solutions that really enable the business to seek value outta data. But what they're not focused on, because you have a platform team, they're not focused on the specifics in terms of how the technology's gonna work to get you there.

Um, so that's something to think about. The last one is agile pulling. Um, digital natives do this pretty well.

I will say that I haven't seen this really work well in an organization, but the idea behind here and and why it's important to bring it up is that value pulling is, oh, agile pulling of resources is the idea that you're gonna take, um, specialties, um, let's use the JavaScript developer as an example and have them be a pool of resources that you then leverage on product teams and you can move them around as projects. Uh, immerse one challenge I do see with that is that when it comes to data or digital, you really wanna have them understand the business. So my feedback is usually, hey, you know, in an organization, maybe have a a product team stay together for a while.

And if you have somebody on that product team that's been there for a long time, one way to keep them challenged and within the company that they work in is to move them to other product teams and have a little bit of agile pulling from that respect. But again, you wanna keep folks in there for a few years and then move them around just so that they are re-challenged as individuals and find other ways to succeed in their own careers. So with that, we've kind of covered the four questions.

I hope I've given you some strategies and if you wanna continue this conversation, I'm happy to do so on LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me and, uh, continue the conversation online. I hope you enjoyed yourself.

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