CONCLUSION:
How to Keep Your Digital Transformation Paydays Coming

A Checklist to Speed Up Your Digital Transformation Payday Loop

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

—H. L. Mencken (1920)

Why start the final part of this book with a statement written around 90 years before digital transformation even existed? Well, only to make it clear what this concluding chapter is and what it cannot and certainly will not be: a simple answer.

If you were hoping to jump straight to the easy‐to‐implement conclusion (or consuming some 10‐minute summary via an AI‐enabled app), I have to destroy your illusion right away: Despite what some managers, executives, shareholders, and even employees seem to believe, experience and the underlying deep research of this book show that just surfing on the hype and buzzwords, and copy–pasting a few concepts and recipes from new so‐called best‐practice examples that are churned out of the digital‐transformation ecosystem on a daily basis, is the most likely common denominator of any failed digital transformation effort.

Instead, I strongly believe that for you to be able to succeed, you must pay utmost attention to all elements and all relevant accelerators and decelerators of your digital transformation journey in great detail and see them end to end across all interacting elements. There has never been such a thing as a value‐generating business transformation without a clear winning strategy, endurance, patience, strong resilience to setbacks, and an eye for the detail and manifold complex interdependencies. As I hope I have demonstrated in this book, just adding digital as another component (or, even worse, as a “digital strategy” buzzword) does not change anything in this eternal truth. Instead, the age of digital often makes things even more challenging as many more potential and heavily interacting accelerators and decelerators for your payday are added to the equation. Therefore, while simplicity can and often should be an outcome of your digital transformation journey, if your strategy rightly aims for it as a key ingredient for winning, the transformation toward this goal usually makes things much more complex at first.

To make things even more challenging: There is no such thing as a single plannable digital transformation payday. Our framework shows that dependency flows in all directions for a good reason. Remember what we said in our framework description in Chapter 3:

All elements can and will influence each other in many directions. This means that not only a multitude of catalysts driving your transformation all at the same time can define which scope … is affected most, but also in return the transformation scope can define which catalysts (for example, digital technologies) have the highest importance for the digital transformation process … The same is also true for the value backflow from digital transformation outcomes, which in return can influence all … elements before them, depending on the actual impact achieved … even though the described elements do not necessarily always create direct outcomes, they can and often will.

So, the journey to your digital transformation payday in real‐life is not a sequential process after all, but rather an interaction of complex multidirectional digital transformation payday loops. If you succeed in designing your digital transformation journey across all the necessary elements, and do it in a way so the accelerators ultimately dominate the decelerators, you should be able to speed up not only your next payday, but also build a virtuous cycle so that the paydays keep coming.

Even though there are no simple answers, there are still a few things you need to consider when embarking on a journey to your digital transformation payday: On your way, you will navigate the hype, lower the risks, and increase your return on investment. Table C.1 summarizes these in a high‐level checklist.

It Is Not Over: Exponential Technologies Are Next

We are done, are we not? Well, not really. We never are.

TABLE C.1 Digital Transformation Payday “checklist.”

TopicConsiderations
Digital Transformation Payday
  • Beware of the digital hype trap and the numerous forces in the digital ecosystem that do not necessarily always have only your payday in mind.
  • There are no such things as easy solutions, universally winning recipes, or directly transferrable digital transformation best practices.
  • If you want your payday to happen with lower risks, never believe in ready‐made checklists, maturity models, or business cases. Listen to them, read them, digest them, and then do your own thing based on your real‐life context.
  • Ultimately, only you can define and judge all transformation elements from our framework and their corresponding accelerators/decelerators end‐to‐end.
  • You are also the only one who can make sure that your return on investment will materialize and your payday will happen.
Design/strategy
  • You must develop a winning strategy.
  • If you do not, what you end up doing will be your strategy, likely with undesired outcomes.
  • Without a defined strategy to win, it's better to not even start your transformation because it will likely not lead to any sustainable competitive advantage and the related paydays you are hoping and striving for.
Catalysts/drivers
  • Remember, digital transformation is not all about new technology supply. Technologies are heavily interdependent and all by themselves do not scale without new capabilities and funding.
  • Do not underestimate your customers' and workforces' rapidly changing expectations; they expect nothing less from you.
  • Always watch out for threats and opportunities from blurring industry boundaries.
Reactants/scope
  • Make sure that whatever you do ends up transforming your core, your likely biggest payday lever in scope.
  • Even if you start at the frontier or in the adjacencies of your business, never forget the core and prepare for later reintegration, transfers, or substitution from the get‐go.
Reaction mechanism/process
  • Never underestimate what it really takes to bring seemingly intuitive agile or hybrid transformation concepts to life at scale in your specific context.
  • Agile done incorrectly can be a very effective tool to prevent your payday for infinity.
Product/outcomes
  • Identify new ways to track outcomes and progress against all pain and resistance.
  • Measure, measure, measure your paydays.
Predictors
  • You are what you are. Know and carefully manage the baseline for your payday efforts and expectations (market context, financials, and communication).
  • They will heavily influence your odds of a successful digital transformation payday loop.

While this book had digital transformations in mind, it is also applicable to any (disruptive) technology‐driven transformation. Most likely, the world already is progressing or will soon move to the next stage of development. It is believed to quickly evolve “beyond digital,” where so‐called “exponentials” (intelligent processes, integrated reality, new energy matrix, digital governance, bioprogramming and neurogamification) make digital transformation look “boring” (Rodriguez‐Ramos 2018, pp. 1–9) in comparison.

But that is a different story and maybe worth another book.

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