IT and Engineering Teams
In 2018, the estimated of cost of digital transformation (DX) to reach was approximately $1.3 trillion. Did you ever wonder why so many companies seem to be falling behind in their quest for digital transformation? Forbes points out very succinctly that digital transformation has never been about updating a company’s website or launching a new mobile app. Digital transformation basically involves an overhaul of your entire business. It requires a cultural change, new skills, and the courage to step outside the box of a company’s past history. DX involves how a company interacts with its customers, how it maintains its quest for excellence, and how it approaches innovation.
Problems
- Understanding the Business Effects Versus the Requirements
Scores of CIOs polled across the country revealed that they “…are continually dealing with issues and problems amid digital transformation.” It is critical to deliver “best-value” solutions that a business needs. IT professionals and engineers who do not listen well and ask the right questions often end up delivering what their business asks for, but not what it needs. Cost, schedule, and performance/features need to always be considered.
- Delivering Suboptimal Solutions
When IT professionals and engineers ask the right questions in the first place and learn how to dig deeper, they eliminate a lot of problems. But leaders often fail to solve problems that need attention and instead tackle the issues that they were asked to solve. This leads to solutions that may be suboptimal from a quality/feature perspective, take too long to implement, and/or go over budget.
- Solution Extensibility
IT professionals and engineers are skilled at capturing information and using it to solve problems, but it is sometimes difficult for them to take a step back and discern where the critical, strategic needs really are. As a result, solutions are delivered without completely understanding the life-cycle cost implications and long-term extensibility requirements necessary to mitigate future work.
- Rearchitecting Costs
Rearchitecting and fixing IT solutions can cost as much, if not more, as the original implementation. Agile and Waterfall processes are designed to make sure that there are checkpoints to mitigate the need for rearchitecting solutions. Regardless of the development methodology, the missing link in these processes is the ability to uncover what is not being said. It’s imperative to gain insight and to truly understand what will best serve the key stakeholder communities and customers, while mitigating the risks, including going out of project scope, schedule delay, and going over budget.
The EQuipt Solution
Historically, what has made IT professionals and engineers successful is their problem-solving abilities, and this predominantly what they have relied upon to drive outcomes. Developing the ability to slow down, listen, and uncover key insights before problem solving is critical to digital transformation success. EQuipt has developed a system to enable your team with the proven tools to uncover these insights.
Proven tools to uncover these insights:
- Overcome solving the problem before truly understanding the problem and its implications
- Help them sell without feeling like they are selling
- Uncover both the emotions behind the business needs and the facts to understand the implications
- Share customer stories to help key stakeholders see a vision of what is possible and how to achieve it
- Get the whole story and business drivers
- Reduce the redundancies, rearchitecting needs, and increase extensibility
- Know the right questions to ask to gain insight