How to Create a

Timeline for Digital

Transformation
Planning for the pain points you'll experience
on your transformation journey

EVERY JOURNEY NEEDS
A NAVIGATOR AND A DRIVER
D
igital transformation is like any journey: before
you begin, there has to be a plan. You need a
timeline mapping out what happens when, who
does what, and the key milestones. Crucially, a timeline
must identify the crunch points when you think things
could become difficult. Knowing where the pain points
are likely to be in advance allows you to allocate the
additional time or resource needed to push through
them and prevent the whole project from stalling.
What’s more, the timeline must acknowledge that those
crunch points are going to happen for different people
at different times.
For most, business leaders are the navigators. They
decide where to go and how to get there. Before setting
out, they have to plan a route that avoids hazards and
blocks. They usually provide some direction along
the way, especially if things take an unexpected detour.
IT leaders are the drivers. They are the ones in control
of the actual journey, going in the strategic direction
planned by the business. They are the ones that make
sure you get to where you’re going.
image
How to Create a Timeline for Digital Transformation
Each has their own unique pressures and will work to
different timelines. Yet transformation is never a simple,
single speed journey.
Some of it will be steady cruising. Some of it will
be a slow crawl. But to reach their destination, both
parties have to perfectly synthesize strategy and
implementation.
The key to this is looking at the digital transformation
timelines of the business leader and the IT leader.
By finding where pressure points occur and devising
solutions to overcome them, the organization as a whole
can get to its destination on time.
The secret to a successful digital
transformation is truly effective
collaboration between business
leaders and IT leaders.
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 How to Create a Timeline for Digital Transformation

THE TIMELINE FOR

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Visualizing the most common pressure points on the digital transformation journey.

Strategy Resistance Scalability

What is your vision for the Change can lead to short term Badly managed innovation initiatives,
future of the business and disruption, so people often without proper IT involvement, can't
where will you start? create barriers scale as required - so progress stalls

87% 70% 82%

believe digital transformation is agree that efforts to transform the agree that business agility is critical to
currently a significant strategic business externally are undermined delivering the transformation that will
challenge for their business* by the internal complexity of the improve the customer experience*
organisation*

Business leader

IT leader
73% 63% 81%
agree that digital transformation feel the business neglects the depth of agree that the pace of change in their
requires a rapid response to avoid systems change needed when trying to industry is increasing due to shifts
commercial failure * build engaging services* in customer expectation around
innovation, service and delivery*

Pace Technology Innovation

Board expectations are a world Entrenched legacy systems are With an increasingly rapid pace of
away from the actual time rigid and not built for change - change, it is a challenge to build the
required for the development making innovation problematic teams with the right skills for agile
and testing of new solutions and rapid experimentation

*Source: The Agility Trap Report, Bizagi bizagi.com 3


THE BUSINESS LEADER’S PRESSURE POINTS
T
he digital transformation journey
starts for business leaders long
before most of their colleagues. In
fact, in the initial stages, they’re the ones
who will pull together the strategy for how
it’s all going to be accomplished. And it’s
down to them to decide how to use new
technology to put the customer at the
heart of what the organization does.
However, getting started can sometimes
be the hardest part. Which is why the
business leader is often confronted with
some of the biggest challenges. Like…
Strategy: Coming up with a plan
When tasked with making a radical
change, it can be a real headache to
figure out how and where to begin.
There’s an urge to start straight away
on disparate pilot programs, risking a
lack of control and scalability. The other
option is to meticulously craft the perfect
transformation plan, but by then months
could have passed with no results to another bright idea cooked up by senior
show for it.
Digital transformation will be a long
and complicated journey. So having a
strategy with a clear end-goal is an
obvious pre-requisite. But building
regular, manageable milestones into
that plan can be harder than it seems.
Resistance: Winning
hearts and minds
The first reaction to change is resistance.
Very few teams or departments will be
doing a celebratory dance when you
announce your digital transformation
initiative. Some people will consider it
a nice-to-have – shiny and cool but
not essential. Others will see it as
management to make their jobs
more complicated.
A minority will stubbornly cling to the
things they’re doing right now and refuse
to change. The business leader will need
to convince them all that transformation
is crucial to survival, and that they all
have a significant role to play in making
it happen.
How to Create a Timeline for Digital Transformation
Scalability: Finding a
repeatable solution
It’s usually a good approach to start
small and then go big. But this comes
with its own set of challenges. It’s
one thing to successfully execute a
trial transformation initiative in one
small team. It’s quite another to roll
that change out across the whole
organization, to all its core systems
and critical processes.
The business leader needs to make
sure that the chosen solutions scale to
the entire business without disrupting
operations or compromising the
customer experience. Not only that,
it’s their responsibility to make sure it
has the right governance and there’s a
seasoned team in place to execute plans.
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THE IT LEADER’S PRESSURE POINTS
I
t’s at this transitional moment that the
IT Leader becomes much more heavily
involved in the digital transformation
journey. They will have been involved in
implementing some trial programs, but
once it’s time to roll it out to the rest
of the organization, they need to start
concentrating on the road ahead. The
change to the business has been defined,
now it’s time to make it happen.
Implementation is just as important to
success as strategy, but it comes with
a set of pressures. Like…
Pace: The board wants
everything now
Once it’s time to roll out digital change,
the pressure to get it done is intense.
The board wants to see results quickly.
But IT leaders task of delivering rapid
pace of change is hamstrung by siloed,
rigid legacy systems. Usually this clunky
tech isn’t built to facilitate rapid change,
so a rethink of IT’s architectural blueprint
is often required to encourage agility.
It’s incredibly easy for IT to become
tied up by ever-growing business
requirements with tight timelines and
endless unforeseen complications to
solve. When this happens the end result
is a complete lack of progress and
execution, perpetuating strain on
the IT-business relationship.
Technology: Legacy Innovation: Creating a culture
systems streamlined
A lot of the tech that companies use is
outdated, inflexible and so isolated that
the right hand doesn’t even know that
there is a left hand, let alone what it’s
doing. The challenge for IT is that they
now have to streamline these business
systems to better serve customers,
but they don’t have the tools to
connect them.
Scalability is a pain point for IT leaders
too, especially during the transition
from strategy to implementation. The
risk of problems occurring multiplies
exponentially as the business moves
from small experiments to large-scale
execution.
How to Create a Timeline for Digital Transformation
of continuous improvement
Digital transformation is a lifestyle,
not a diet. There is no end date, and
specific goals will change over time. This
means that IT leaders must break free
from traditional thinking and forego
outdated development methods that are
incompatible with rapid experimentation.
The right technology will help kick-start
this cultural change. Agile technology
platforms can bring new, innovative
products and services to market much
more quickly, easily and cheaply.
Now that we’ve outlined the main
pressure points facing IT leaders
and business leaders on the
transformation journey, we can start
to think about how to resolve them …
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HOW BUSINESS LEADERS
CAN EASE THE PRESSURE
Coming up with a plan
Quick Wins: Devise a transformation plan that builds
momentum through a series of incremental quick wins.
These mini-milestones guarantee that things keep
moving and there are frequent results to share with the
board. It reassures them that theory is becoming reality.
Winning hearts and minds
Get Buy-In: Share the vision for digital transformation
with department heads and get their buy-in. Show
them the role they have to play and how their input will
contribute to the wider business. This has to come from
the top; if senior managers evangelize the change, it will
trickle down to all levels of the organization.
How to Create a Timeline for Digital Transformation
Finding a repeatable solution
Leverage Platforms: Businesses need a new kind of
technology to remain competitive in a digital world –
a technology based on a platform, not on products, and
one that can connect people, devices, data and things to
bring agility into how a business operates.
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HOW IT LEADERS CAN
EASE THE PRESSURE
The board wants everything now
Think lean: Look at light technologies that drive
change and avoid large-scale implementations. Your
goal should be to build momentum by rapidly delivering
results (however small) through minimum viable product
(MVP) projects. It should follow a cycle of experiment,
optimize and iterate. But this requires all stakeholders
to understand that the “time to digital” is different from
usual delivery timelines.
Legacy systems need to be streamlined
Add an agile layer: Enhance your existing systems
rather than replacing them. A Digital Business
Platform can bring disconnected systems together and
consolidate fragmented data. It’s about empowering
employees with connected systems and information.
Delivering this information to employees at the right
time is the way to create a superior customer experience
that will generate competitive advantage.
How to Create a Timeline for Digital Transformation
Creating a culture of continuous improvement
Experiment and iterate: Say goodbye to traditional
requirements documents. Be a champion of agile
experimentation, empowered by model-driven
development technologies that drastically reduce the
time to market of new solutions. Such technologies
enable you to collaborate directly with the business
when creating solutions - in an environment where
you retain ultimate control.
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 How to Create a Timeline for Digital Transformation

THE NEXT STEPS TO DRIVING

THE BUSINESS FORWARD
Business leaders and IT leaders face different timelines 1
when it comes to turning digital transformation strategy
into reality. As part of those distinct timelines, there Agile - Quickly develop and
are a range of challenges they need to overcome and a adopt new operating models that
range of activities they need to get right to deliver rapid, create competitive advantage.
repeatable change for their businesses.
2
What we’ve outlined here is a set of simple, practical
approaches that can help these two key players create Engaging - Use data, content
and context intelligently across
real change. But whichever you relate to the most,
the moments that define the
you should be looking for solutions that can help the customer experience.
business to be more:

3
Connected - Seamlessly
orchestrate people, processes,
applications and “things” on
a global scale.

Delivering all three will mean IT and business leaders are steering their businesses in the right
direction. But achieving any of this is going to be an uphill battle unless you improve improve
the relationship between IT and the business.

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 How to Create a Timeline for Digital Transformation

SUCCESS
SUCCESS STORIES
STORIES YOU
YOU
CAN LEARN FROM
CAN LEARN FROM
Below you’ll find information about just a few of the organizations that
Below
haveyou’ll
seen find
hugeinformation about
benefits from usingjust a few
these of the organizations
strategies that
outlined above
have seen huge benefits from using these strategies outlined above

An innovative team automated a complex CTO Morgan Porter championed agile This retail banking and insurance provider
global supply chain across 500 sales experimentation, automating the organization’s connected the organization’s disparate
operations and 400 factories, leading to most critical process in just 90 days, leading systems and data, leading to a significant
a 60% reduction in operating costs. to a 21% increase in customers. reduction in customer waiting times.

Learn more Learn more Learn more

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 How to Create a Timeline for Digital Transformation

WHAT NEXT?
Discover how specific approaches and technologies can help you
in overcoming the challenges we've discussed in this e-book

For Business Leaders For IT Leaders

Read 'How to Kick-Start Your Read 'What is a Digital

Digital Transformation' Business Platform?'

go to bizagi.com/Kick-Start go to bizagi.com/DBP

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