The COVID-19 Upheaval, Hidden Complexity, and Digital Transformation
Pandemic adaptation fosters a mindset that’s essential for organizational change
Upheaval forces rapid change. In a few months, everyone has adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some adaptations like personal protective equipment (PPE) and decontamination were essential for workers in healthcare, emergency response, and eventually in places like supermarkets. Others, like intensive hygiene, are essential for everyone’s health. We’ve adapted to recommendations such as physical distancing, and to mandates like shelter-in-place, business closures and cancellation of activities. Now we use videoconferencing in schools, churches, families, and more. We learned new terms like COVID-19, PPE, social distancing, N95. Creative adaptations include use of technology to support healthcare workers and first responders, and making face masks.
We’ve adapted to earlier upheavals. The 9/11 attacks and the Great Recession changed our economy, culture, and people in more ways than I can describe here. Upheavals disrupt lives and businesses, but people responded by changing business, government, and institutions — and we adapted to that New Normal. In time, we’ll have a post-COVID-19 New Normal.
Digital transformation (often styled as “DX”) is a different but ongoing upheaval that’s also impacting our economy, people, and culture. As we continue to adapt the pandemic upheaval, it has created a mindset of adaptation that can accelerate your DX readiness. Adaptation matters, since a McKinsey survey found that only 26% of transformations succeed. The survey also found that engagement of employees was a key success factor.
While DX has many definitions, my view is that DX is best seen as the application of “big data” tools to advance decision-making, process efficiency, and customer experience. This series will focus further on two components in the transformation — people and processes — that are critical to success of the transformation but too often are eclipsed by the “digital” half of “digital transformation”.
The COVID-19 pandemic and DX share these features: hidden complexity and rapid adaptation. The pandemic has revealed lots of hidden complexity in our world. We’ve seen how medical ventilators are designed, produced, and distributed in a small, highly-specialized market. Vaccine development takes months-to-years even in the best case. And who knew that pandemic toilet paper shortages are related to a dual market and supply chains (and not hoarding or increased use)? Now we understand complexity that was always there, revealed in this new climate.
As your business adapts to the DX upheaval, cross-functional alignment across technology, analytics, and business teams is critical. These teams have grown apart with complexity in technology and organizations, divided by function, culture, and language. At best, separation is merely inefficient; at worst, it breeds conflict and dysfunction. The New Normal of DX has challenged even the largest and wealthiest companies.
Now, smaller companies are deploying DX technologies like robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning (ML), and data visualization tools like Tableau, PowerBI, and Qlikview. Behavioral analytics leverage data streams of your prospects and customers to create custom experiences. New data streams come from IoT (“Internet of Things”) devices like smart watches, thermostats, speakers, and doorbells. Your data environment is rapidly adding volume and complexity. AI and BI add further complexity as they leverage your growing data.
In this series, I’ll discuss how the hidden complexity in your data environment creates both pain points and untapped resources. In your DX journey, your people (and you!) will adapt to new tools, processes, and language. With these changes, new problems will emerge, and the adaptation continues.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll post articles on these topics:
- What is digital transformation?
- DX requires adaptive discipline
- Strengthening data quality
- Aligning meaning (business metadata)
- Data stewardship as cross-functional diplomacy
- How structure, process, and governance can create a nimble organization
- Creating a shared understanding of the data environment
As a leader in your business, the most important thing is to be curious about your data environment. Your own people are a great place to start — they know how things should work, and when a process doesn’t work they know the pain points.
Reducing pain points requires cross-functional collaboration and process ownership. Process ownership creates predictable accountability with roles and responsibilities. Then analytics, technology, and business teams can collaborate to solve data environment problems like poor data quality and creating a “single version of the truth”. By nurturing a mindset of adaptation in your business, your team will be ready for new tools, technologies, and language. In the short run, your DX journey accelerates. In the long run, you’ll be more prepared for the next upheaval.
Tom Hirata is the Founder of Data Mandala and developer of the More Meaning and Less Cleaning framework for small-medium businesses to level-up their data environments for digital transformation and privacy compliance.
To schedule a Privacy Compliance Check-up call with Tom, where you’ll learn 3 capabilities you must have for consumer privacy regulations like the CCPA and GDPR, click here. You can also message me on LinkedIn.
When you’re ready to think beyond COVID-19, I’m here to accelerate your transformation.
