{"id":43,"date":"2020-05-26T15:50:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-26T13:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/klassen.digital\/?p=43"},"modified":"2021-10-27T11:41:14","modified_gmt":"2021-10-27T09:41:14","slug":"digital-transformation-an-it-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/klassen.digital\/?p=43","title":{"rendered":"Digital Transformation – Business topic or IT topic?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A couple of weeks ago I was asked to name the three hot topics for IT this year. A lot of things came to my mind, but one of the most obvious not: The Digital Transformation. Why is that?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before we go into detail, let’s talk about some basic things first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Different meanings of Digital Transformation<\/em> <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

There is no doubt that Digital Transformation<\/em> is one of today’s most heard buzzwords, both on IT and business side. But what exactly does it mean? Well, it depends. In my opinion, the real Digital Transformation<\/em> is basically the – often disruptive – transformation of a formerly “analogue” business into an IT driven, digital business. Many people also see business process optimisation and the subsequent digital implementation also as Digital Transformation<\/em>, although this is nothing more than Business (Process) Automation<\/em>. More on this later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To add to the confusion, there is also the widespread misunderstanding (especially in German speaking countries) of Digitisation<\/em> (German: Digitalisierung<\/em>) versus Digital Transformation<\/em> (German: saying Digitalisierung<\/em> but meaning Digitale Transformation<\/em>). People also very often use Digitalisierung <\/em>as a synonym for a digital implementation of processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Talking about Business Process Automation: This has been a core competence of IT ever since. Starting with the finance sector in the early years, IT has automated a lot of processes throughout the whole value chain and is still doing so. So, who should be in charge of the digital future, if not IT?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BTW: What do you get when you automate a bad manual process? Right: A bad automated process. So before thinking about a big Digital Transformation, you should start with your processes by first optimising them, and then automating (“digitising”) them, in close cooperation with IT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IT needs to understand the business<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In order to successfully support, if not drive, the Digital Transformation, IT needs to fully understand the business and the underlying processes. In most cases this can only be achieved when there is a corporate IT which is highly integrated with the business, and not just some fully outsourced service provider, the staff of which will never identify with the company they are providing the services for. In addition, an external service provider will only drive innovation insofar as it fits into his business model and strategy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following chart taken from a slightly old but still relevant post by Campana + Schott <\/a>perfectly shows the necessary evolution of IT:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/a>
The transition of IT<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The challenge here is that in many companies the internal IT was never developed to a stage where it would be capable of driving the Digital Transformation, which leads to the development of dedicated Digital Transformation departments – sometimes even under a board member other than where IT resides. I personally think that this development is counter productive. It might probably work for large companies, where developing a second IT from scratch in parallel to the existing one or ones, is done faster than transforming IT to support and finally drive the whole process of getting the company digital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital Transformation by a dedicated department? <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The reason why I doubt that a separate Digital IT department is the way forward is, that I have seen bad examples of lighthouse projects being developed with only little or no IT interaction, which were after their “implementation” thrown over the fence to IT to run something which looks good on paper, but was not thought through to the point where someone has to run and maintain it – no procedures, no handover from legacy systems, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion: Neither IT nor Business – Both!<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In the ideal world, where IT is closely working together with the business, and where there is a mutual understanding of each other’s job, both parties together should drive the Digital Transformation, with IT providing the technological basis and the business filling it with content. Without IT there is no Digital Transformation!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further reading<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A good read on the role of IT is this post by Campana + Schott<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to name the three hot topics for IT this year. A lot of things came to my mind, but one of the most obvious not: The Digital Transformation. Why is that? More → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-automation","category-digital-transformation","category-role-of-it"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/klassen.digital\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/klassen.digital\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/klassen.digital\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klassen.digital\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klassen.digital\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/klassen.digital\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":372,"href":"https:\/\/klassen.digital\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions\/372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/klassen.digital\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klassen.digital\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klassen.digital\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}