Assess Your Digital Transformation Opportunities | Plan Your Projects

Steve Andriole

Every Board of Directors and senior management team aspires to the efficiencies and competitiveness that digital transformation might deliver. But the path to transformation – as we learned in the 1990s when “business process re-engineering” was all the rage – is mined with explosives. Digital transformation, like all major corporate initiatives, must be well planned and exquisitely executed. 

Before setting up expensive "innovation labs" or funding huge digital transformation projects, your company should do some homework. Digital transformation is not just a software upgrade or an RFP to find a new supplier. Digital transformation is a shock to what may be a pretty functional system:  it turns to the extent of organizational functionality — or dysfunctionality — at a company. Your company may or may not have the competence to transform business processes and models. Cutter Consortium can help you find out.

Cutter Consortium offers an assessment and project planning methodology that will help you determine if and how you should launch projects intended to transform your processes and business models with operational, strategic, emerging and potentially even disruptive digital technology. Our approach, developed by Cutter Consortium Fellow Dr. Stephen J. Andriole, consists of five tasks that have emerged from transformation efforts we’ve seen over the past few years and from the cumulative understanding of enterprise program management that has evolved over the past 50 years.

The 5 Tasks are efforts that should be performed before any company launches serious digital transformation projects.

Task 1: Assess the Overall Opportunity

Cutter Consortium’s assessment results in your “digital transformation quotient.” You score may reveal adequate skillsets and competencies, solid executive support and/or available funding. It may reveal several prerequisites that must exist before undertaking digital transformation projects. Or it may reveal that, while your company loves the idea of transformation, it’s not ready, willing or able. This assessment is a key tool in making a go/no-go decision.

Task 2: Identify High Impact Transformation Targets

It’s important to know where the leverage lies and where the digital transformation dollars should be spent. During this phase of the engagement, we will identify your high impact opportunities.

Task 3: Prioritize the Target Processes & Models

Once your Transformation Targets list is fleshed out, we will help you prioritize the targets according to available talent, support, and expected impact.

Task 4: Identify High Potential Digital Technologies

During this task, we will identify operational, strategic and emerging digital technologies and the roles they play based on the processes and models identified in the previous task. New technology clusters are continuously coming over the horizon, and should be identified, described and assessed. The technologies you ultimately choose can transform business models and processes, so understanding these technologies is critical.

Task 5: Plan the Project(s)

Lastly, we will develop an executable, funded, and supported project plan during the last phase of this engagement so you can launch and execute your digital transformation project(s).

Our Experience

We’ve been involved in a variety of transformation projects over the past few years in financial services, insurance, higher education, pharmaceutical and real estate industries, among others, where the objective was to assess a company’s ability to digitally transform key processes and even whole business models. The cases involved:

  • Transformation of customer service processes with unstructured data analytics (speech to text to sentiment)
  • Transformation of technology delivery processes with private cloud providers
  • Transformation of learning processes with augmented reality
  • Transformation of brand management with proactive social media
  • Transformation of crisis management processes with real-time alert monitoring and reporting; 
  • Transformation of no processes because of the inability to proceed past Task #1.

Cutter’s 5-task Digital Transformation Readiness Assessment, led by Cutter Fellow, Dr. Stephen J. Andriole, typically requires 10-15 days of effort spread across 45-60 days.

Transformation can occur by simply tweaking a simple process (for example, eliminating some steps or adding some personnel) or it can be enabled by existing and emerging digital technology. But before your company can cherry-pick "cool" digital technologies from pundit-proofed lists, you must fully understand not only what the technologies do, how they do what they do, and the degree of possible optimization-through-transformation they offer, but also which processes and business models are ripe for transformation. Cutter’s Digital Transformation Readiness Assessment will give you the confidence to move forward with your chosen digital transformation projects. 

What's Next?

For more details on assessing your digital transformation opportunities and planning your DT projects, complete the form below, send an email to your Cutter Account Executive, or call +1 781 648 8700.