Digital Transformation - Start with a Workshop

Change Your Perspective, Change Your Motivation

This week I returned from the CIO Peer Forum Conference in Vancouver. CIO's today have a refreshing perspective around understanding the leadership role they provide their organization. Whether leading small or large groups, private sector or public, one of the topics that people kept coming back to was, how can they improve their leadership skills to guide their teams through their continuous improvement.

So the FREE half-day Digital Transformation Workshops I’ve been doing resonated with many folks.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, my breakout went somewhat deep into technical topics. I outlined the landscape of new tools and technologies  we have at our disposal, and  tried to clarify which tools DO NOT solve certain problems well (information that is hard to find from software vendors).

My session sparked several interesting follow-up conversations around either invigorating an ongoing, mid-stream transformation initiative or laying the foundation and kicking off a new digital transformation around Data Governance, Analytics, Data Security or Cloud/Hybrid modernization.

All of these discussions were open to re-thinking their disruption from the perspective becoming an internal startup with the intention of disrupting “the way we’ve always done things” in a similar way to Airbnb, Amazon, Uber, etc. By focusing on this “startup” POV, we gain the benefit of focusing on customer value, where the customer can be the business ‘customer’ that the CIO is serving.

Change is ALWAYS difficult, but there are ways to grease the skids to make change easier. Making work fun, clarifying goals, being open to innovative, outside-the-box thinking, gamification, etc.…there are many ways to to encourage people to work and think differently. But change happens best using the carrot rather than the stick. 

By using my Digital Transformation Workshop to refine the definition of our ‘startup’ and the products/services we provide in a way that must be superior to any available competition, that motivates changes better than any alternative I’ve seen. 

Send us an email, give us a call. We’d love to chat and set up a workshop to start this internal “Lean Startup” way of thinking about Digital Transformation.