So welcome to 2015 and my first post of the year!

One of my goals for my posts this year is to relay my experience of delivering a digital business transformation in the hope that it helps, supports, proves or disproves your own thoughts and ideas on delivering your own digital transformation

The first question to answer is how do you get started? The old school approach has been to spend a significant amount of time (and money) understanding where you are now and where you need to be. This tends to involve many weeks and months of capability audits, skill assessments, workshops, roadmaps etc. Often resulting in many 100+ page Powerpoint documents with some beautiful imagery and graphs, and 1 page executive summaries.

Personally I’ve found this to be of no use. Who knows where you should be? Competitors? Consultancies? Frankly I don’t know how anyone can clearly define where you should be, other than yourself. The digital channels and engagement desires of your customers are evolving continuously. Businesses (including your competitors) are trying different things continuously in a vain attempt to deliver the promised goal of many a transformation.

For me Digital Transformation is really a number of smaller measurable projects, delivered at speed and iteratively. This is not just to ensure you quickly provide value to your customers, but also because the digital arena is adapting and evolving so quickly, the sooner you’re in the game, the better!

So the 4 key steps to take to start your transformation are:

1. Focus your transformation not on how your business is organised or desires to be portrayed externally, but on your customer. Read about the business your customers are in, spend a little time talking to them. Be wary though, they also don’t know what they want and can steer you completely in the wrong direction, but they will be able to clearly identify for you where the opportunities lie! From this you’ll probably get a bit of a gut feel for the area your transformation needs to focus on.
2. Don’t even think about trying to transform the whole business. You will fail. Don’t even try a whole function. Instead define a small measurable goal to kick off your transformation. Avoid a company wide one e.g. growth in a country by x, or y new customers. You want something small such that you can identify the external factors that may influence your success in achieving that goal. I would make every attempt to keep the audience of this small, the board I have found are best kept at a distance at this stage. You’ll need them later!
3. Engage with a small consultancy to brainstorm how you can deliver that goal. What digital tools / channels do you THINK will help. Until you try no one knows for sure, so this is a leap of faith. What the agency will be able to do for you is provide you a semblance of probability of success based on their experience. try to ensure your transformation project touches a number of digital technologies and or channels. For example include a website, blogs and an app in your first project.
4. Finally develop your project plan, Ensure you can deliver the majority of the activities in 12 weeks! I know that sounds aggressive, but it can be done so long as you keep everyone focused on the fact that this is an iterative deployment and perfection is not required out of the gate.

So that’s how I got started. Happy to hear any views on what you’ve tried, but in case you haven’t started yet…get to it! Time waits for no-one!