Enabling Digital Strategy
The Situation
Upon the appointment of the new Global Chief Digital Officer, the Digital Transformation Programme was initiated with a view to setting up and planning activities within the programme to accelerate digital adoption across the global legal firm.
The objective was to execute the Digital Strategy the Board Members and Executive team agreed upon within a global legal firm.
The Task
My role was to validate the Digital Strategy with the global partners and leadership team, followed by scoping and shaping the programme.
The Action / Approach
Key actions included presenting the strategy to the partners and leadership to verify the alignment of the vision and business objectives, collecting feedback, understanding digital maturity, and then identifying critical areas of values and opportunities.
Without taking this action, the digital programme would be at risk of being yet another programme of work that is not executed due to the exclusion of senior stakeholders during this initial stage of the transformation, resulting in a lack of senior team buy-in.
Based on the analysed feedback, I refined the definition of the strategy, created a comparison matrix between the current state and the desired future state, and designed a proposal and recommendations for the work packages to support the execution of the Digital strategy.
By capturing the feedback and presenting actionable outcomes back to the stakeholders, I overcame the resistance and drove the adoption of the change that was to come.
The Result
My biggest challenge was convincing the global chief digital officer that the strategy vision needed to match the partners’ and leadership team’s expectations.
By demonstrating data-backed findings, we arrived at the digital transformation roadmap set to drive, move and reset the organisational vision and successful, timely delivery of evidence-based digital transformation outcomes beyond solely focusing on digitisation. For the internal and external customers, this meant:
- Enabling and better utilising existing tech by training targeted users and exposing the current tech tools.
- Optimising current capabilities in an agile fashion with incremental releases and feature adjustments based on user feedback.
- Transforming the ways we work by eliminating waste, understanding dependencies and reducing complexity.
- Embedding a culture of collaboration.
- Creating space for innovation of future digital trends.
Focus In On: Responsible for Digital Business Transformation
New Areas of Value:
Digital transformation that drives, moves and resets the organisation’s vision
Direct positive impact on internal and external customer satisfaction
Increased credibility, confidence and influence across the business
Successful, timely delivery of evidence-based digital transformational outcomes; beyond digitisation
Creating a culture of involvement, empowerment and connection to the business
Improved business agility and ability to rapidly respond to change and opportunity
Gain access to additional budget through success
Driving a culture of innovation for easier and faster adoption of future digital trends
Improvements around:
Lack of availability of the right people at the right time across both business and technology areas
Lack of transformation, change and agility mindset in leadership
Cynicism, lack of buy-in and resistance to change
Lack of exec sponsorship and ownership
Lack of process and technical integration strategy making the overall solution less efficient
Poor data strategy resulting in siloed, incomplete and poor quality data
Lack of agreement of transformation governance and stakeholder understanding leading to a fragmented approach
Unclear and siloed business strategy leading to misaligned goals across the organisation that conflict with transformation
The IT function is not aligned to the digital business strategy and vision
Leaders mandating a change management and implementation approach that’s not appropriate to the organisation
Lack of clarity around existing operating model, internal business ecosystem or cross-functional teams
Conflict between perception and reality of digital skills, tools, methods and talent required and available
Budget availability affected by external change drivers and uncertain resource estimates
