Hi Reader,

By now you have probably heard that I have decided to leave my current publishing arrangement and self-publish the book with professional support from SelfPublishing.com. This email is the first of the new cadence and format. If you didn't see my previous update you can get the details here.

Excerpt from Chapter 2: "The Role of Senior Leadership in Technology Implementations"

Choosing your DX Vision

Just as a trip around the world requires a significant amount of preparation, so does embarking on a transformational initiative.

The first step is choosing a destination. Without a destination, it’s impossible to know what you’re preparing for. After all, preparing to go to Norway in December will look much different than preparing to go to Florida or the Bahamas in December.

Similarly, preparing to implement an ERP system will be vastly different than preparing to expand to a new market. The destination–or in the case of DX initiatives, the vision–dictates the type and amount of preparation needed for the project.

Many times, when I come into a project with a client, they don’t have a transformational vision. They have a problem they want to fix or an opportunity they want to pursue.

That is a reaction.

Vision unifies the team, helps prioritize decisions and resources, reduces resistance to change, and more throughout the initiative’s life cycle.

The first step is establishing a transformational enterprise vision, which is outside the scope of this book. There are many good books available on this topic and numerous consultants that will help you with this.

This book is focused on using digital transformation as a means to realize your enterprise vision. For the purpose of this book I will assume you have already documented your vision for the future of the enterprise and you have broken that into strategies and objectives.

It is important that your enterprise vision doesn’t start as a technology vision, or worse yet, combine the two as if they are the same thing.

For example, I know of a company that recently manufactured and sold its product entirely through other retailers, such as Wal-Mart or Fleet Farm. They did not sell to the end customer.

This was risky, since one lost retailer could mean a significant loss of their market.

So they decided to begin direct sales, since they didn’t have stores of their own.

In a scenario like this, here is the vision I would recommend.

“We will double our top-line revenue in 3 years by selling directly to our end-using customer while maintaining our current level of revenue through our retail partners.”

This vision isn’t a technical vision. It is a business vision. Technology will be needed, but business is the primary focus here.

I call this a business-first vision.

Business-first vision is opposed to technology-first vision. Unfortunately many organizations start with technology first. Here is generally how that happens.

A company like the example above may say, “selling through a few larger retailers exposes us to too much risk. We need to start selling directly to the consumer.”

Then someone might say, “We need to sell online.” If the CIO was in the conversation, they may say, “We need to implement an e-commerce system.”

This is solutioning rather than visioning.

Solutioning almost always leads to a technology-first vision.

It would be tempting to write this vision something like this:

“We will double our top-line revenue in 3 years by adding an e-commerce sales channel to sell directly to our end-using customer while maintaining our current level of revenue through our retail partners.”

This treats technology as the solution, rather than a means to an end. When you start with technology it shuts off other avenues. I can think of several ways to potentially reach this goal that do not include e-commerce sales. If you move too quickly to a solution, you may not see the opportunities that already exist.

For example, there’s selling through Amazon. If I had provided only the technology-first vision, would you have considered that option?

One other major problem with technology first is that business managers aren’t responsible for technology initiatives, IT managers are. Technology-first visions shift the responsibility from the business to IT because you are no longer providing a business solution to a business problem, you are administering technology. Technology becomes the tail wagging the dog.

This brings in other problems as well. We will discuss those problems in a future chapter.

Keep all technology specifics out of your enterprise business vision. I call this being technology agnostic. All enterprise business vision should be technology agnostic.

I hope you found this email useful. I'd love to hear your feedback. You can send me an email with your thoughts or if you would like to talk to me you can use the button below to schedule a time on my calendar.

Kind regards,

Tory Bjorklund