Digital Fluency

The Key to Digital Transformation

Fluency is the property of a person or a system that delivers information quickly, accurately, and with expertise. Another important attribute of fluency is the ability to understand a subject as an integrated and interrelated whole — not merely a collection of parts. The effective design and implementation of digital systems requires this perspective.

Realizing the potential of digital transformation (DX) requires fluency in all the aspects of digital transformation as well as the ability to view the digital enterprise holistically. How do we achieve that level of fluency, even though DX is a relatively new subject area and there is no universally accepted definition of the term — much less a clearly understood body of knowledge from which to draw hard conclusions?

What is Digital Transformation?

It’s many things to many people. To some it’s batch ETL, to others, streaming ETL. It’s data warehousing. It’s data access, data transformation and data delivery. It’s data integration. It’s data analytics. It’s data networking. It’s cutting edge Web and mobile applications. It is all of those things, but it is also much more. It’s the architecture, frameworks, tools, and processes that enable the creation, deployment, and management of the applications that do those things.

Digital transformation is the transformation of the business from end to end through the application of digital technologies — with the objectives of enhancing brand image, accelerating sales, reducing operating costs, and growing the business. Digital technologies are the electronic tools, systems, devices and resources that generate, store, or process data. This includes social media, Web applications, mobile games and applications, multimedia, productivity applications, cloud computing, interoperable systems and mobile devices. Digital technologies can be directed internally to enhance efficiency and externally to interact with prospects, customers, and business partners. DX is not new. It has existed since computers were first used in business. What is new is the level of power and sophistication that is now available through digital technologies — and the enormous pressure to apply that power and sophistication to make the business more competitive.

Why Do We Care?

Digital transformation is a major challenge and opportunity. When implementing DX initiatives, organizations must deal with the cultural changes they will confront as they adopt and rely on new and unfamiliar technologies, the technical learning curve they must surmount to implement DX solutions, and the cost of deploying, securing, managing, maintaining, and adapting those solutions as the organization evolves. An organization does not digitally transform with one major effort. DX is a mindset and a journey of iterative improvement as an organization makes itself more effective one step at a time.

DX has created unique marketplace challenges and opportunities as organizations contend with nimble competitors who can take advantage of the lower barriers to entry that technology provides. Additionally, due to the high importance given today to technology and the widespread use of it, the implications of DX for revenues, profits and opportunities can have a dramatic upside potential — and failure to effectively exploit DX can have serious negative consequences.

Digital Transformation Fluency

Effective exploitation of DX begins with fluency in the following areas:

• Communicating a clear corporate vision of the overall goals of digital transformation and why those goals are important to the organization.
• Fostering a culture of innovation and iterative improvement within the organization.
• Providing effective management and governance of both the data and processes that implement DX.
• Using a unifying digital framework to integrate the diverse components needed to implement the digital transformation vision.

Corporate Vision

Digital transformation reaches into almost every part of an organization. Without a clearly expressed corporate vision of the overall goals of digital transformation — and a common agreement on why those goals are important to the organization — there will be inevitable thrashing, interdepartmental conflict, false starts, and wasted time and money. Though DX is best implemented from the bottom up, without proper leadership from the top down chaos will likely be the result.

If people understand and buy into the vision they can, despite obstacles, implement it. Throughout the implementation of DX initiatives, hundreds, if not thousands, of individual decisions will be made by people at all levels of the organization — decisions that could not possibly have been made in advance — and if those people share the vision, most of those decisions will be sound and projects will continue to move forward.

Though it is not necessary for most corporate leaders to get down into the technical weeds, it is important for business leadership to understand what kinds of business optimizations might be accomplished through digital transformation — and where DX’s potential can best serve the business. It is critical to communicate that vision throughout the entire organization. Digital transformation is a never ending journey and as with any exploration into new territory, leadership and vision are key ingredients.

Culture of Innovation and Iterative Improvement

Digital transformation is not a one-time effort or a few projects and then we’re done. It is a continuing process for applying digital technologies to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and competitive state of the business. To be successful, DX must be partnered with a corporate-wide culture of innovation and iterative improvement — and a constructive obsession with finding better ways to do things. In today’s fast-moving and competitive marketplace, maintaining the status quo is rarely a good strategy.

It can be said that if you cannot measure something, you cannot make it better. So hand-in-hand with iterative improvement must come a process for predicting and measuring the effects of each iteration or innovation. Having an objective measurement process in place — coupled with rewards for meeting or beating measured goals — can provide a powerful stimulus for building an effective culture of innovation and continuous improvement.

It is important that the techniques, tools, and software frameworks chosen to implement DX initiatives provide support for and synergies with the culture of innovation and iterative improvement. If they conflict with the cultural imperatives, they will make that culture difficult or impossible to establish.

Management and Governance of Data and Processes

Digital transformation is a process that will produce thousands of artifacts, both data and procedures, over time. For engineering, operational, security, and legal reasons, those artifacts need to be well managed and governed. The techniques, tools, and software frameworks used to implement DX will have a major impact on the size and complexity of that challenge.

Some of the most impactful choices are between object-oriented versus procedure-oriented models and loosely versus tightly coupled components. There is an enormous difference in the number of different object types versus the number of discrete procedures or functions that make up an application — and a potentially exponential increase in the number of artifacts to be managed when using a procedure-oriented model instead of an object-oriented model. The greater the number of artifacts the more complex the management task. On average, as application size grows, the increase in complexity is linear with objects and exponential with procedures.

From an artifact management perspective, object-oriented RESTful APIs are far more scalable than procedure-oriented SOA or RPC-like microservices APIs. Because of the growing popularity of the REST architectural pattern, many implementations claim to be RESTful when, in fact, their only similarity to the REST pattern is their use of HTTP and JSON. The essay, Thoughts on RESTful API Design, by Geert Jansen of Red Hat, paints a clear picture of how RESTful APIs should be designed.

Loosely coupling components is another important strategy for reducing management complexity as system artifacts change over time. Because loose coupling minimizes dependencies among components, a change to one component is less likely to cascade into problems with other components. SOA and microservices are, by their very nature, tightly coupled because they require rigid contracts between requesters and responders in order to function. The management of those contracts adds to the overall complexity of managing system artifacts.

An effective versioning strategy is also essential for controlling management complexity. In the real world it is extremely difficult to propagate changes instantaneously for all enterprise systems across data centers and hybrid cloud environments. Multiple versions of components will frequently have to coexist for some period of time. Runtime version control must allow compatible versions to interact, while also identifying and resolving collisions between incompatible versions when they occur.

Unifying Digital Framework

The long-term success of any digital transformation initiative ultimately depends upon an organization’s ability to unite and integrate data and procedures within and across enterprises — connecting both the organization’s intra-enterprise assets and the extra-enterprise assets of customers and business partners — spanning internal data centers, hybrid cloud infrastructure, and internet-connected resources of all types.

Wrapping Up

Today, few would argue that digital transformation is not important. Even fewer would agree upon what digital transformation really is, because digital transformation is as varied as are the businesses that must grapple with implementing it. Digital transformation is a journey of exploration and navigating it successfully requires digital fluency.