Rubber, Meet Road - Digital Transformation  Session 4

Halfway through The Icehouse’s newest programme – Digital Transformation (DX) – participants will have learned about the importance and developed a sense of urgency around DX adoption and its vital place in their business.  

The first three sessions dealt with the four revolutions and disruption in DX, defining your vision and strategy while establishing what success looks like, and understanding your why. 

While sessions five and six offer valuable, practical and tailored advice on choosing tech, strategy, and planning, session four reviews the first three parts of the programme before introducing the concept of ‘Rubber, Meet Road’. 

The analogy helps explain how DX influences the vital components that sit underneath the business.  
 
“What are all the things I need to do to make sure that when we do this, it's going to go as best as it possibly can?” explains Brett Roberts, the programme’s co-lead facilitator. “Think of it as driving from the top of the north island to the bottom. You must ensure you have a good car, good tyres, fuel, roadside assistance and so on.” 

Successful DX implementation often involves asking some tough questions before choosing your tech. After all, if you don’t know what problems or improvements you’re trying to solve or make, how will you know what tech you need to complete your journey successfully? 

The analogy is also helpful from a leadership perspective. “Leaders need to ask; Where are we going to start? How are we going to do this? How are we going to chart progress? We're going to make mistakes, so how are we going to deal with those? All this needs to be a part of the equation.” 

The session continues, guided by another analogy – the changing nature of electricity supply and usage in the 1900s, and it’s an excellent way for participants to understand how to ‘do DX better’. 

After its ‘invention’ in the late 1800s, by the early 1900s electricity needed to be generated by a steam power plant at your factory, or by horsepower, wind, or whatever it might be.

“Then, all of a sudden, electricity started appearing out of three holes in the wall,” says Brett. “It was effectively generated somewhere else. You paid for it, it became a utility, a service, and you didn't have to worry about it. You simply paid for usage on a per-month basis. This is very much like a lot of software these days.

“The companies that really didn't understand it just took their existing machinery or whatever it was, and put electric motors on it, for example. The smart companies rethought what was possible in the light of these new technologies. What new things can we do with this wonderful thing we call electricity? And what current things can we do differently or better with it?”

“People tend to forget ‘invisible’ things relatively quickly. So, how do you leverage it to do things differently, because if you don't, your competitors are. You don’t have any choice.” 

As well as developing an appreciation of the golden opportunities DX presents, this programme can also help you unlock new insights into how to integrate DX into your business in ways as yet undiscovered.

This is especially exciting for leaders and leadership. “As a leader in your organisation, how do you make sure that you're not just taking the existing things and shoving a technology wrapper around them, without really thinking about what it is you're doing and why you're doing it?” concludes Brett. 

The session concludes with an explanation of the five domains of the digital transformation model, the importance of culture and communication to leverage a DX advantage fully and above-the-line versus below-the-line DX (for example, customer-facing external initiatives against internal systems). 

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