Computing Delta: CIOs share their single key digital transformation strategies

Top CIOs give their advice for driving enduringly transformational digital transformation projects

CIOs shared their major organisational transformation tips at DTEXPO today on our exclusive Computing Delta discussion panel.

Aubrey Stearn, CTO of Nationwide's digital accelerator, said her go-to thought is always ‘culture'.

"If you want to get that right, every single community is different," she said. "Work out the outcomes you want to achieve, and work out the outcomes you want to work toward."

Speaking for herself, Stearn said she classes herself as the sort of person who "likes to cause bit of drama and cause fantastic change, [but I know] there are other people who are better suited at making the organisation comfortable with that change. I'm not so great at that point in my career".

Stearn explained how she'd initially found her own difficulties when entering areas of Nationwide, and other businesses as an interim ‘change maker' by "not asking the right questions" on a fundamental level. "Now, I ask a lot of questions to make sure I can make the changes I want to make."

Stearn warned not to underestimate even the basics of changing a work environment. "I can't tell you the amount of times I've argued about free coke or food on the floor. That's happened in so many offices. The engineers you hire today look at Google or Facebook and see what they have, and they ask, ‘Do you work in a WeWork?'. They see that freedom, and they want it."

Overall, Stearn advised that enacting good organisational change through digital change is about to "be organic".

She continued: "Let the thing grow. Every time we've been successful, we've started with a rough plan of how it's going to work, but then we've let it grow out on its own."

For a financial services organisation, this seems a particularly refreshing conclusion.

That said, Stearn added the caveat that with advice on a deeper technical reality: "This may be controversial, but we hold everything in a single codebase, so it's not flexible in that way."

Mark Ridley, former CIO of Reed.co.uk and now director of CTO advisory firm Ridley Industries, chose prioritisation as the main thrust of his strategy.

"It sounds a trivial answer, but it's about how you need a different personality type to be responsible for transformation," said Ridley, in core agreement with Stearn.

"The ‘change agent' is happy changing things, but not necessarily afterwards. Putting the right leadership in place is important.

"Then it's also, perhaps, about building a company that's always changing. But what's most important of all is the skill of prioritisation. How do you understand which projects to invest in, and how will they work together? It's not [going to be] the brain child of someone high up in the organisation.

"Just because the CIO has an idea, doesn't mean it's good - not better than someone who's just walked into the organisation," said Ridley.

Ridley has helped organisations test prioritisation of resources by breaking existing teams down for small, skunkworks-like projects.

"At Reed, it became apparent that an organisation that had started with four people had suddenly become big and political. So we built an in-house incubator to focus on teams of four cross-functional people, and put them in a crappy office with a dartboard and a shoestring budget, and they ended up outrageously more productive than the teams they'd come from."

Ridley pointed out that even if a developer and a sales person worked on a new idea for two weeks and came up with nothing concrete, "they would come back saying ‘We've learned more than we knew two weeks ago, and now we need a finance guy to help work out the next step'". And so on.

For Finbarr Joy, senior advisor at Superbet, the key teaching became, simply, about defining digital transformation as actually being digital transformation, and using this as a powerful starting point.

"When people talk about transformation, they're usually not talking about transformation," he stated. "It's not transformation to move to the cloud or adopt Agile, for example. The business model is usually not changing in any way. To make our teams work better requires extra discipline and execution strengths."

As a working example of when moving to cloud becomes true digital transformation, Joy said: "I'm lucky enough to be working with teams now that are ‘NoOps' - literally all in the cloud. The cost saving is enormous and resource management-wise, [there have been] a lot more efficiencies."

As well as the infrastructural move to cloud, the business culture has changed to the point where those doing the work are fully integrated with the technology, Joy added. "If it's a true transformation, C-level or founder level commitment are needed, and that's the only way I've seen it work."

Joy lamented how frequently he's seen projects misdefined as "digital transformation" give organisational change a bad name.

"The moment it starts to cross with how finance and operations work, the IT function is simply wound back and it's labelled as another failed IT transformation, and then it's time to bring in some business consultants, as they're seen as the ones who know what they're doing."

"It's actually not about changing how people think, but what they do. And from that experience, they do actually change," concluded Joy.

Delta is a new market intelligence service from Computing to help CIOs and other IT decision makers make smarter purchasing decisions - decisions informed by the knowledge and experience of other CIOs and IT decision makers.

Delta is free from vendor sponsorship or influence of any kind, and is guided by a steering committee of well-known CIOs, such as Charles Ewen, Christina Scott, Steve Capper and Laura Meyer.

Ten crucial technology areas are already covered at launch, with more data appearing and more areas being covered every week. Sign-up here for your free trial of the Computing Delta website.