Digital transformation has been applied to so many different projects that it has stopped carrying information. It has described replacing a file server, migrating to the cloud, and restructuring an entire company. When a phrase covers all three, it is not telling anyone what is about to happen.
Stripped back, the work usually turns out to be some combination of four things.
One: replacing something that cannot scale
There is almost always a system at the center of it that worked well at a smaller size and does not work now. It might be storage, a network, an application, or a process that depends on one person. Everything else in the program tends to be downstream of this.
Two: connecting systems that do not talk
Most organizations run more systems than they intended to. Each was bought to solve a real problem and each holds data the others cannot see. A large share of transformation work is getting those systems to share information, so that a question can be answered without someone exporting three spreadsheets.
Three: moving from capital to operating cost
Often the technical change is smaller than the commercial one. The same capability is delivered as a monthly service rather than a purchase. The infrastructure may barely change. What changes is who owns it, who maintains it, and how it appears in the budget.
Four: getting visibility
The one nobody puts in the business case and everybody wants. Knowing what hardware exists and where. Knowing who has access to what. Knowing what the network is carrying. Most organizations discover during a transformation program that they had less visibility than they assumed, and that a lot of decisions had been made on estimates.
It is sequential, not simultaneous
The program that go badly are usually the ones that try to do all four at once. The dependencies are real: you cannot integrate systems that are about to be replaced, and you cannot sensibly move to a service model for something you have not yet mapped.
The ones that go well tend to start with visibility, because it is cheap and it corrects the assumptions everything else is built on.
The part nobody budgets for
People carry on working the way they did before unless something changes their day. A platform rolled out without migration, training and a support path becomes a system people log into once. This is the most common reason a technically successful project fails to deliver anything.
Where to start
An inventory. What you own, what runs on it, who uses it, and what is closest to the end of its useful life. It is not the interesting part of the work, and it changes the shape of everything that follows.
Let’s Work Out the Right Order.
Unison has delivered infrastructure, cloud, security and managed services to Philippine organizations for forty years. If you are scoping a program, we can help you work out the order.