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“With digital, organisational change aspects are absolutely critical, particularly in established companies. We’re very proud to have helped many successful organisations accelerate their digital journeys, bringing to bear a mix of transformation change disciplines honed over decades, with experience of newer digital approaches and technologies.”

Will RiversPartner

Everything digitalIt’s hard to turn to any business or sector-specific website or journal these days and not see an article about digital. Many sectors already have well-known examples of digital innovators and disruptors and as customers ourselves we look for, buy and consume experiences and products in very different ways to even a couple of years ago. The digital revolution is well and truly underway.

Whilst Digital can still mean different things to different people, at The Berkeley Partnership we believe Digital is about harnessing technology to drive value in this much faster, tech-savvy and data-rich world.

Digital transformation involves harnessing aspects such as Big data and analytics, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics as well as a different mindset and organisational capabilities to be truly focussed on speed and the customer/user. There are some key differences between ‘traditional’ and ‘digital’ transformation.

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Digital Strategy & Transformation

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Your digital journey In the context of this, the challenge for every organisation is to identify their vision, what opportunities exist for them, where the value lies and how to unlock it. The good news is that digital technologies available can help you get there faster and often with lower (if any) capital outlay:

• It’s possible to buy analytics capability through the Cloud on a pay-as-you-go basis.

• You can see the results and quickly respond to a marketing campaign through social media in hours, rather than the weeks it could take through traditional media channels.

• You can use digital platforms to recruit and engage your staff, and be really innovative, such as faster and more convenient connections with mentors or experts across global organisations.

It starts with your vision for digital and then what journey to take.

Early stages

The Digital Transformation JourneyFragmented strengths Embedded and constantly

innovating

To win on the journey, we believe there are certain characteristics of a digital mindset that are particularly key:

• Customer obsessed; being completely focussed on the customer or consumer, understanding and predicting their needs and behaviours.

• Learning obsessed; having the curiosity and drive to constantly evolve and learn.

• Agile; having an organisation that is more nimble, that can cut across traditional boundaries or stovepipes to deliver value more quickly.

• Data and intuition; using the myriad of data smartly when taking decisions, but not ruling out judgment and intuition.

• Leadership; doing fast right, fostering an environment of experimentation and learning and never forgetting about strong business values and disciplines.

These together with the right approach, decision-making and digital organisational aspects can make your digital journey the most successful it can be.

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• Digital can be difficult to ‘envisage’ and ‘design’ up front – it’s hard to know how customers and colleagues might really behave.

• There can be a desire to bypass a business case due to the ‘digital imperative’.

• Establishing new agile ways of working can be hard.

• It can be a real challenge in moving from the initial small ‘garage’ to the enterprise-wide ‘factory’.

• Pilots can turn out to really be proof of concepts, causing early disappointment and frustration if they run into problems.

• Pilots often don’t test enough of the different business variables and deployment factors.

• Insufficient longer-term scale-up planning can take place in parallel so the organisation carries ‘technical debt’ (early trade-offs made to be fast) through and isn’t ready to industrialise.

• A ‘learn by doing’ approach can be useful – start small through experiments and proof of concepts then scale up.

• It’s still important to do a business case at a higher level than usual, as it can help guide the Minimum Viable Product and roadmap.

• You may need to iterate with drawdown of funds to meet specific objectives rather than expect commitment to a big multiyear investment; Finance and other business stakeholders need to buy-into this approach.

• Looking at the delivery model options (such as agile vs. ‘hybrid agile’) up front and assessing and adapting based upon requirements, maturity and risk profiles is vital. It may still be right to take a waterfall approach for enterprise-level infrastructural change.

• There is much talk about ‘failing fast’ but this can be hard to do – make sure that governance and checkpoints genuinely enable this.

• It’s helpful to set up clear criteria and ‘fail fast’ governance. For example, early work could be experiments where the objective is to learn about some ‘unknown unknowns’ – it’s good to be overt about this.

• Understanding what the different ‘archetypes’ of the business are (such as the key market characteristics or brand/product differences) and making sure there are enough pilots to learn from. Don’t forget that critical path activities, such as data acquisition, should also be tested.

• Building in longer-term planning to early phases, including the design of repeatable deployment and funding models that will facilitate scale-up.

2. Digital needs a different delivery approach

3. Experimentation, proofs of concept and pilots are essential but these need to be carefully crafted

• Digital can appear quick with the speed that start-ups can move at.

• Organisations can be seduced by the apparent simplicity– an ‘agile organisation’ can be hard to create.

• It needs a truly holistic approach often with a re-definition of the relationship between the business ‘product owner’ and IT.

• Many suppliers and technology providers can be involved, creating complex ecosystems to manage.

• The right balance of empowerment/agility with rigour/control can be hard to get right.

• Leadership and sponsorship that can drive a truly digital mind-set and integrate across siloes is vital. According to Forrester, 55% of organisations achieve double-digit growth through digital when it is sponsored and led by the CEO (as opposed to other C-level roles where the figures are 41-48%).

• Managing expectations around the transformation journey – highlighting where the complexity and challenge are likely to be for the organisation.

• Blending the right mix of innovation and experience across the business & IT and ensuring clarity in key CMO, CDO and CIO roles.

• Approaching the supplier ecosystem differently – take the best but integrate across and ensure incentives are aligned to a digital approach and outcomes (e.g. milestone-based payment).

• Empowering teams to challenge the established model without losing the rigour – keep testing and amending the balance throughout.

1. Digital needs strong business leadership and management particularly in large, established organisations

How you can be successful on the journeyHere are some factors that we believe can make a real difference:

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How we can helpWe have helped a number of different organisations accelerate their digital journeys, bringing to bear a mix of business transformation change disciplines honed over decades with experience of newer digital approaches and technologies.

We can help with:

• Setting strategy in the digital world and defining your digital mindset and overall journey

• Business cases and KPIs

• Defining decision-making for your digital journey and how it will work with your current governance models

• Partner selection

• Mobilisation of the digital journey including experiment and proof-of-concept definition and management

• Scale-up/industrialisation including digital operations and organisation, and on-going optimisation

• Complex programme leadership and management, including change management

• Delivery assurance of your digital journey

We have particular expertise in:

• Digital marketing

• Big Data and analytics, including organisation models

• Digital asset management

• Agile software delivery procurement and management

• E-commerce and omnichannel

• Platform management and DevOps

• IT and data organisation structures

• Delivering Cloud/Software-as-a-service (SaaS)

“Where Berkeley have been particularly of use to us is bringing some of that discipline and structure into a digital context and what we’ve used them for is to run proof of concepts, do it in a way where we bring lots of partners together, get the learning out fast and then move on and it’s really been a successful engagement.”

Mark McClennon, Marketing and Consumer CIO, Unilever

• The focus can be on the technology and tools.

• Not enough thinking can take place on the new organisational skills and capabilities that will be required or how the business will actually need to work differently.

• User adoption can be much lower than you think, even with strong top-down leadership and sponsorship in place.

• Investing in strong change management from the start, particularly where digital maturity is low in the organisation.

• Digital still needs a framework in which to grow the operational capabilities. It will also put pressure on some underlying business weaknesses to be finally fixed, such as enterprise-wide data and content management.

• New skills and capabilities will require thinking about how recruitment, career development and culture change will need to be done differently.

• Building in user adoption and benefits realisation measures early on, and checking the business is really using the new capabilities.

4. Digital still needs business and change management

Our experienceHere are just a few examples of our work in this space:

Implementing a strategic consumer data analytics capability for a global FMCG

We delivered an in house, one-stop-shop for social listening and consumer analytics insights enabling brands to better understand and engage with consumers, develop strategies, conduct market research and plan marketing to drive growth and performance globally. An early proof of concept was stood up in a matter of weeks and enabled

consumer behaviour to be analysed differently to yield results in changed marketing campaigns.

Delivering a strategic retail B2C Marketing & Digital Communications capability

We led both the business and IT delivery components of a major programme to build a leading edge customer insight and marketing capability on behalf of the CMO. This was

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focused on establishing a set of advanced core competencies that included; customer data analytics / science, CRM, personalisation, and digital communication tooling.

Transformation to create a new ‘digitally native’ internal web agency

We led the overall programme as well as business case and supplier selection streams to deliver a cloud solution for all internet and intranet content with 200+ sites spanning 100 countries, in 29 languages and five major brands. Benefits included: improved site resilience and flexibility, improved digital security, annual OPEX savings and a significantly reduced lead time over traditional methods of hardware procurement, rack & stack, deployment & testing.

Enriching internal shipment, retailer ePOS and loyalty data for a large FMCG

Previous BI & analytics were fragmented across different functions and geographies. This programme looked to use richer data including ePOS, supply chain and loyalty card to provide better insight into customer resulting in stronger relationships and 11% growth in sales. We provided an interim Programme Director and several other key management roles.

Strategy in a digital world for a packaging organisation

We helped develop the strategy for a packaging organisation to enable them to benefit from Digital trends and approaches. This included how analytics can help them deliver value-add services to their customers to optimise their logistics, using virtual reality to envisage how packages will look in shelf formats to optimise customers’ shelf-fill, and how IoT sensors can help improve package transportation and handling for better cost and quality outcomes.

Delivery of new e-commerce capabilities for a high-street retailer

We led the transformation to deliver new e-commerce platform with a new mobile site. This involved integrating back-end order management systems and warehouse and logistics providers through the supply chain, as well as enabling mobile apps and in-store kiosks. This delivered a step-change in time for the all-important Christmas period.