Digital Execution

Definition

Digital execution is taking your digital transformation strategy and implementing it across your entire business. It’s a new means of developing software that affects every aspect of your business: people, processes, application portfolio, and your platforms or technology.

How to create a digital execution plan?

To create a digital execution plan that is agreed upon and uniformly executed across departments, organizations need to:

  1. Place program owners or managers that empower collaboration across departments.
  2. Determine software development practices that can be adopted across departments.
  3. Ensure that all software created through this program align back to the digital transformation vision.

What are the stages of a digital execution plan?

Digital execution requires going through three major stages:

1. Start – organizations put the necessary perquisites in place. At this stage, you determine what applications will be built and who builds them. Creating one to three applications that align with the organization’s digital transformation vision and can quickly garner value is the goal.

2. Structure – organizations grow from that first set of applications into a portfolio. This portfolio addresses multiple use cases and begins to incorporate more and different technologies. Here, you formalize the teams and processes that you established in Start so that they are all working toward an organizationally-aligned digital transformation strategy.

3. Scale – at Scale, you’ve created an ongoing, digital transformation practice. Now, you’re managing an ever-growing application portfolio of multi-use apps. You’ve created a self-sustaining function of the organization that continuously monitors and measures the value of the apps and the development process.

Each stage has its own set of objectives, all with the aim of turning the application development function into a scalable and repeatable process.

What are the 4 P’s of digital transformation?

1. People – The people of an organization are absolutely critical to the success of a digital transformation program. A diversity of skills and experience lend itself well to creating new types of software.

2. Process – Building software in a cross-functional manner requires a new means of collaborating. Organizations need to consider different methods of developing and iterating that go beyond waterfall or Agile. Lean, BizDevOps, and Startup are all different development methodologies that encourage faster delivery and more collaborative approaches.

3. Portfolio – For digital transformation projects to succeed, organizations need to ensure that the solutions being built always lead back to the goals and vision of the strategy. This starts with identifying the right projects and ensuring they are high-value, quick-win initiatives. On top of this, a diverse application portfolio that addresses different use cases that reach many different departments is also vital to success.

4. Platform – Digital transformation projects can often result in the adoption of many commercial off-the-shelf solutions that can, when combined, bog down an entire IT infrastructure. Organizations need to adopt an application development platform that brings the entire enterprise into the software development lifecycle, integrates with their technology stack, and is primed for future tech trends.