Business transformation is about adapting to a culture of continuous change, not just a one-off deployment. Discover how changing your culture enables business agility.
Around 96% of organizations are currently undergoing a business transformation. It's no wonder, since a turbulent, ever-changing market, where new technology is appearing every few months, makes agility and adaptation key.
Yet, a transformation ise not just about an enterprise resource planning (ERP) upgrade or adding artificial intelligence (AI) to your tech stack. It's transforming your entire business model so it's able to change and adapt rapidly over and over again as the market requires.
This means ensuring that your IT landscape is flexible and modernized, of course. Yet, that's far simpler than managing the expectations of your employees.
Adapting to continual change is challenging for teams who are looking for stability and clarity in their work. Winning people over on the need for business transformation means adapting your workplace culture to one of continuous transformation.
We believe that the key to adopting a culture of change is the ability to share your oversight on your IT landscape with all of your stakeholders. That's why it's key to have a single source of truth on your enterprise architecture data that anyone in your organization can view.
To find out more about how LeanIX can support your business transformations, download our white paper:
DOWNLOAD: Insight, Communication, Engagement: How EA Supports Change Management
Business Transformation Means Continual Change
Business transformation is an incredibly popular buzz word in enterprise at the moment, but few truly understand it. To many, it just means cloud migration or enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformation, but this is just a part of it.
Organizations could once take five years to complete a transformation, and could delay if they faced any issues. Once complete, they could be confident that the change was made and they could rest for a decade or so before embarking on their next update.
This is no longer the case. Transformations are now urgent, and by the time you've completed one, your new systems are likely already behind the cutting edge. [p]Transformations now need to be made quickly, simultaneously, and constantly. As soon as a software upgrade is completed, you need to start preparing for the next one.
To say that most organizations are struggling with this would be an understatement. Essentially, businesses are acting as if this new normal is just a series of temporary crises happening one after another that will eventually peter out.
However, the pace of technology and the market is accelerating and shows absolutely no sign of slowing down. There's no reason to think that the constant need to change your technology is going to go away.
More than that, it's no longer a matter of technology being one part of your business where imperfection can be made up for in other areas. Everything we do in enterprise is now touched by technology and having legacy systems means your entire business strategy is behind the times.
The key here is to accept that the market has changed and you need to change with it. Once transformation is a permanent state, rather than a point of stress, you can start making it manageable.
Adapting your systems to permanent change is a great deal of effort, but relatively straightforward. You simply need to adopt modern, cloud-based services that are designed to thrive in a permanently changing market.
The truly complex challenge that faces you is adapting your business culture so that your people not only accept continuous change, but support it. We believe that the key to this is transparently sharing information.
Selling Business Transformation To Stakeholders
Business transformation is a pain for your users: Tools and information they use every day will move to different places They have to learn to use new tools and develop new skills Downtime will harm their productivity and make it harder to hit their targets Processes will change and cause confusion and disruption The threat of change to come makes any workplace activity feel pointless.
What's worse, the impetus to make these changes may be avoiding end-of-support technology or supporting a background change that has no impact on the day-to-day work of your employees. To everyone outside of your IT team, transformation often means added effort without any reward.
No matter how much you work on change management, you won't be able to manage that frustration so long as your people don't understand the need for it. That's why we say that transparency is vital.
Yet, equally, as soon as you start talking about technical debt and system stability, you'll lose the attention of most of your non-technical users. You need to show the real-world consequences of not changing, not just talk about them.
Once you offer your users a clear, understandable representation of the need for change, it becomes much easier to gain the support of users for the new normal. Supporting continuous change, however, requires continuously winning stakeholders over.
That means that you need to monitor and share your success in and as a result of transformation, reminding them of how far you've come. Seeing the impact transformation has had on the organization inspires trust that what you're doing is for the best.
When your stakeholders can see an unbiased representation of the consequences of not undergoing a transformation, they have no reason to dispute the transformation. From there, change management is simply making the process as seamless as possible for your stakeholders.
How LeanIX Can Support You
As we've explained above, business transformation is all about the open sharing of information on the need for change. That's precisely what LeanIX was designed to do.
The LeanIX solution acts as a single source of truth on your enterprise architecture information. We don't charge by user account, meaning any stakeholder in your organization can have read-only access to your dashboards.
Those dashboards are visualized with a traffic light system, meaning it's easy for anyone to see the status of the applications and IT components across your IT landscape. You can then fast-forward this view to see what it will look like going forward or after projects have been completed.
Once up and running, LeanIX will then continue to track your enterprise architecture information over time, so that you can see your progress. You can even design your future, post-transformation state in a sandbox environment and build a road map to get you there, which can be shared with stakeholders.
Using all these capabilities, you can clearly visualize your technology landscape for all your stakeholders and users. This takes the bulk of the hard work out of business transformation.
To learn more about using LeanIX to enable change management and adopt a culture of continuous business transformation, download our guide:
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