The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on our world, affecting our day-to-day lives in ways we never could have imagined even a few short months ago.

For many organizations, these changes have led to a fundamental shift in how we define business as usual, causing many companies to reassess and reprioritize their business and IT goals and budgets in dramatic and unexpected ways.

During this environment of unprecedented change and uncertainty, it may be tempting for some companies to put digital transformation initiatives on hold and instead focus on more familiar and less disruptive efforts. But this is already a time of disruption, and many aspects of digital transformation are exactly what’s needed to help your organization move forward, whether you seek to deliver more value to customers, pursue new opportunities for growth, improve efficiency—or all of the above.

As you contemplate what’s next for your organization and industry, consider how the following four IT initiatives can help advance your digital transformation goals and better position your organization to grow and succeed today—and throughout all the better days ahead.

Break Through Silos With Agile Practices

With workers physically separated, many are seeking clever ways to encourage collaboration, teamwork, and community. From digital water cooler chat hours to new platforms and technologies, the current remote work scenario has in many instances led to new connections with departments or individuals collaborating that have never worked together before.

As these connections are forged, you have a unique opportunity to encourage DevOps style practices throughout IT operations. Self-service help desks, team integrations, and feedback loops that span traditionally siloed arenas such as ITOps, development, security, and support are some of the ways you can foster innovation by dissolving departmental barriers. Gaining C-level buy-in is a critical success factor to rolling out agile initiatives with clear and regular communication about who is involved, what needs to happen, and why these changes make sense given company goals.

Make “Everything as a Service” a Reality

The industry has been kicking around the term “XaaS” for years as marketing teams added “aaS” to the end of just about any kind of web-based, on-demand service. Now more than ever, the time for XaaS is here. One example is large scale events going digital-only with “Events as a Service.”

The current environment is ideal for scaling a cloud and -as-a-Service strategy because it allows companies to be more agile amid fluctuating market conditions. As monthly consumption for IT services grows, companies will need IT staff to manage subscription spend. As leadership grows more comfortable with operational expenses versus fixed cost spending on physical hardware, it can lay out a plan to continue scaling services into the future.

The key is determining which platforms and applications are a good fit to change to a consumption-based model, as going wholesale into the cloud may lead to greater costs for some situations.

Focus on Customer Experience

Despite the devastation caused by the pandemic environment, it has also brought out the best in many of us. More than ever, individuals and organizations are looking out for our neighbors, families, small businesses, and communities at large. And although it’s easy to dismiss pandemic-oriented services as opportunistic, the general attitude of customer-centricity is one many companies are looking to adopt moving forward.

The customer experience is what ultimately drives revenue or proves the value of IT services (and the individuals providing them). One of the first steps to digital transformation is changing the driving force from products to the customer experience.

When considering this move, ask: “How does our technology make things easier for the customer or the end-user?” Soliciting and implementing feedback from users into technology delivery, and doing so quickly enough so that they take notice, will lead to amazing experiences that help your organization grow and retain customers.

Identify Opportunities to Automate

If you’ve put certain projects on hold, consider transitioning that IT staff to other initiatives aimed at gaining efficiencies and reducing cost through automation.

Consider experimenting by automating simple and routine tasks using mature technology like business rules engines, mobile app platforms, and native cloud automation tools. Companies that are ready to go deeper can explore low-code, AI, and machine learning.

Many other changes to IT operations may occur, either as a direct result of the pandemic or as a related side effect. But the use of automation, agile practices, customer-centric services, and “-a-a-S” and cloud solutions will play a role in other technologies and processes the company implements.

While it can be overwhelming to throw too much change at your organization at once, it’s worthwhile to use this time to prioritize your transformation efforts and map out a plan. So when we do get through this difficult time, we’re all prepared and better positioned to move forward together.

TechNative

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Success requires bringing together and coordinating a far greater range of effort than most leaders appreciate. A poor showing in any one of four inter-related domains — technology, data, process, or organizational change capability — can scuttle an otherwise well-conceived transformation. The really important stuff, from creating and communicating a compelling vision, to crafting a plan and adjusting it on the fly, to slogging through the details, is all about people.

More than anything else, digital transformation requires talent. Indeed, assembling the right team of technology, data, and process people who can work together — with a strong leader who can bring about change — may be the single most important step that a company contemplating digital transformation can take. Of course, even the best talent does not guarantee success. But a lack of it almost guarantees failure.

Let’s explore the talent needed in each of the four domains in turn.

Technology

From the Internet of Things, to blockchain, to data lakes, to artificial intelligence, the raw potential of emerging technologies is staggering. And while many of these are becoming easier to use, understanding how any particular technology contributes to transformational opportunity, adapting that technology to the specific needs of the business, and integrating it with existing systems is extremely complex. Complicating matters, most companies have enormous technical debt — embedded legacy technologies that are difficult to change. You can only resolve these issues with people who have technological depth and breadth, and the ability to work hand-in-hand with the business.

Challenging as these difficulties are, an even more critical issue is that many business people have lost faith in their IT department’s ability to drive major change, as many IT functions are primarily focused on “keeping the lights on.” Eventually, however, digital transformation must incorporate institutional IT, so rebuilding trust is essential. This means that technologists must provide, and demonstrate, business value with every technology innovation. Thus, leaders of the technology domain must be great communicators, and they must have the strategic sense to make technological choices that balance innovation and dealing with technical debt.

Data

The unfortunate reality is that at many companies today most data is not up to basic standards, and the rigors of transformation require much better data quality and analytics. Transformation almost certainly involves understanding new types of unstructured data (e.g., a driver-supplied picture of damage to a car), massive quantities of data external to your company, leveraging proprietary data, and integrating everything together, all while shedding enormous quantities of data that have never been (and never will be) used. Data presents an interesting paradox: Most companies know data is important and they know quality is bad, yet they waste enormous resources by failing to put the proper roles and responsibilities in place. They often blame their IT functions for all these failures.

As with technology, you need talent with both great breadth and depth in data. Even more important is the ability to convince large numbers of people at the front lines of organizations to take on new roles as data customers and data creators. This means thinking through and communicating the data they need now and the data they’ll need after transformation. It also means helping front-line workers to improve their own work processes and tasks such that they create data correctly.

Process

Transformation requires an end-to-end mindset, a rethinking of ways to meet customer needs, seamless connection of work activities, and the ability to manage across silos going forward. A process orientation is a natural fit with these needs. But many have found process management — horizontally, across silos, and focused on customers — difficult to reconcile with traditional hierarchical thinking. As a result, this powerful concept has languished. Without it, transformation is reduced to a series of incremental improvements — important and helpful, but not truly transformative.

In building talent in this domain look for the ability to “herd cats” — aligning silos in the direction of the customer to improve existing processes and design new ones, and a strategic sense to know when incremental process improvement is sufficient and when radical process reengineering is necessary.

Organizational Change Capability

In this domain we include leadership, teamwork, courage, emotional intelligence, and other elements of change management. Fortunately, much has been written about this domain for many years, so we won’t review it here, other than to note that anyone responsible for digital transformation must be well-versed in the area. While, we have no firm evidence to support this, it seems that those who gravitate toward technology, data, and process are somewhat less likely to embrace the human side of change. Of course, in our recommendations above, we have urged leaders to seek those with excellent people skills. If you are unable to find them, a good alternative is to put some “purple people,” those able to work on both sides, on the transformation team.

Pulling It All Together

So far, we’ve discussed the technology, data, process, and organizational change capability domains as if they existed in isolation, which of course they don’t. Rather, they are part of a larger whole. Technology is the engine of digital transformation, data is the fuel, process is the guidance system, and organizational change capability is the landing gear. You need them all, and they must function well together.

Consider the “our systems don’t talk” problem, which bedevils most companies and is anathema to digital transformation. But in which domain does it belong? As described above, it is a tech problem — but it also leads to enormous process inefficiencies. Yet it stems from a lack of solid data architecture, and it may involve organizational structure and politics issues that are difficult to change. So one could argue that any domain should take the lead. But the best solution involves the four working together.

Absent a deep understanding of each domain, it is difficult for nearly all business leaders to see the full potential in digital transformation — a contributing factor to many failed digital transformations. But of course, no one individual possesses all the required knowledge and capability. Hence our call to assemble talent in each area.

Finally, work on technology, data, and process must proceed in an appropriate sequence. It is generally accepted that there is no sense automating a process that doesn’t work, so in many cases, process improvement or reengineering must come first. On the other hand, some transformations will feature large doses of artificial intelligence. Since bad data stymies development and deployment of good AI models, in these cases, work on data should come first. Start with your end goals, then develop the sequence of steps best suited to achieving them

Digital transformation can and should be focused on problems of greatest need to the company. Those priorities will also lend a flavor to the talent needed; if the focus is on transforming customer relationships, for example, the data talent on the team may have particular expertise in customer data, the process talent on sales and marketing processes, and so forth. More important, however, is that the talent possesses the four types of expertise we have described and has had previous success at creating and executing on any kind of technology-driven transformation.

Harvard Business Review

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Cloud infrastructure services spending hit another record in Q1 2020, growing 34% to $31.0 billion, according to recent research from Singapore-based Canalys. Growth in cloud services was driven by organizations around the world moving to remote work as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. As a result, enterprises sought rapid access to compute resources in the face of lockdowns and disruption.

In a statement, Alastair Edwards, chief analyst at Canalys pointed out that many organizations have turned to the public cloud for its burst capabilities to meet a sudden spike in use. Platforms such as Zoom would not have been able to operate without the flexible infrastructure provided by the major cloud providers.

Digital Investment Caution

But the research also showed something else. Despite the encouraging figures, enterprises are starting to show some caution in investments as they wait for the economic impact of the health crisis to kick in.

Cited in the Wall Street Journal,Mathew Ball, chief analyst at Canalys also pointed out that thatin order to cut immediate costs, many cloud users are taking out three-month contracts with cloud providers, rather than one- or three-year contracts, to keep employees working during state lockdowns. “Large enterprise consultative-led digital transformation projects were put on pause. Businesses shifted to enable remote working, which changed typical usage behaviors in terms of applications and network dynamics,” Ball said.

This implies a change in the way organizations are doing business. But is it changing their entire business model? While the way companies are doing business may change, a business model that is geared towards customers will largely remain the same, especially given that many have been investing in cloud-based technologies over past number of years.

Organizations Need to Transform

The pool of potential consumers is still there, Hung Nguyen, marketing manager at Switzerland-based Smallpdf told us. He points out that all that is happening is that customer behaviors are changing. People no longer purchase CDs, they stream music. Renting DVDs is a thing of the past — since we now have Netflix and Hulu. Even at this very moment, people are conducting business meetings via Zoom instead of having a face-to-face sit down due to COVID-19. “To stay competitive, business owners need to appease their existing user base through traditional means (newspapers, ads, physical letters) while starting to adopt methods of acquiring users online (SEO, ads, social media, e-newsletters). The latter is the definition of digital strategy,” he said.

Organization must continue analyzing their competitors’ behaviors, explore different acquisition channels, and use what works best for their business. Business owners should always stay open-minded with developing technology, new business strategies, and new pricing models. “The online world is changing, and the needs of digital transformation vary, industry to industry. Organizations should be excited about the opportunity to reach a wider audience more than anything,” said Nguyen.

Digital Transformation for All

David Moise president of Houston-based Decide Consulting believes it is. Digital transformation is not something reserved for the Fortune 500, the smallest of companies can digitally transform. “Whether you like it or not, every business is a software business. Let’s take a mom and pop restaurant. A restaurant that manages Yelp, Groupon, DoorDash and social media better can create a clear advantage over competing restaurants,” he said.

“Most businesses have email, CRM, accounting and some operational system at a minimum. Zapier offers over 2,000 integrations designed for non-programmers to use. “Do you want an email from a specific domain to automatically create an event in you CRM? A lay-person can do this without a programmer or a $350/hr digital transformation consultant,” he said. He added that in a world where 5G, Machine Learning and quantum computing are just around the corner, not digitally transforming is the biggest risk.

Being Ready for Digital

What threatens your business model is not a lack of digital strategy — it is a lack of being ready for change. That would have been true before the pandemic and remains true today, Vaclav Vincalek, a partner in Vancouver-based Future Infinitive. “If you are not prepared to change, everything will threaten you,” he said. “Customers will leave. You’re not adapting while your competition is coming up with a better business model.” All that’s happening now is that current events sped up certain changes that were already happening (Whether companies will carry their digital strategies fruition after the pandemic ends, remains to be seen).

With any digital strategy, part of it is about managing risk — because to be fair, it is extremely difficult to change while the company must keep delivering products or services, without interruption, to its customers. “If you’re doing that, it’s not really a ‘betting the farm situation.’,” he said. “Digital strategy, like business strategy in general, often involves making bets on changes that you think will be beneficial. You check the data to see the results. You make sure you’ve got a repeatable process. And if the bet works out, you can start scaling up that change to where it really transforms your business.”

Digital Transformation Solutions

With the current crisis, it seems that many more enterprises see digital transformation as one of the solutions to their problems. Since the beginning of the crisis, the multinational professional services network firm PwC has been monitoring the impact of the coronavirus on enterprises through surveys of CFOs.

The PwC’s COVID-19 CFO Pulse of the week to April 14 showed that 53% of the respondents with plans to defer or cancel investments are considering IT and another 25% are considering digital transformation. Only 2% of those financial executives are considering reductions or deferrals of cybersecurity or privacy investments, according to the survey. The report reads, “Significantly, relatively few global CFOs (18%) say they plan to defer or cancel investments related to digital transformation. At the industry level, this ranged from 24% of energy, utilities, and resources CFOs to just 11% of technology, media and telecommunications CFOs.”

It adds that this overall reluctance is not a surprise given that digital transformation stands to play a large and critical role in the latter stages of crisis especially as organizations accelerate automation or other new ways of working on-site, consider contact-tracing technologies to ensure workplace safety and look to create more integrated and tech-enabled supply chains.

Digital transformation, it seems, will be leading the charge to rebuild enterprises after the coronavirus has passed.

CMS WiRE

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In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, wrote Being Digital, a book which helped introduce the concept of digital transformation, a “irrevocable and unstoppable” shift in business processes from physical atoms to digital bits. Twenty-five years later, digital transformation languishes as an aspirational strategy for most firms.

A McKinsey & Company 2018 report found that although 80% of enterprises have attempted a digital transformation project, fewer than one-third have succeeded at improving company performance. Another report, the 2019 Chaos Report from The Standish Group, found that 84% of technology projects “partially or completely fail.” Meanwhile, the Dell Technologies Digital Transformation Index claimed a mere five percent of firms had attained “digital leader” status.

With that kind of track record, the thought of implementing a digital transformation initiative during the Covid-19 pandemic seems even more daunting. One reason is less fiscal capital. Market researcher International Data Corp. on March 11 said the outlook for annual growth in global IT spending could drop to 1%, or roughly $2.3 trillion, down from a February forecast of more than 4%.

The other reason is muted interest in acquiring human capital. Corporations posted 370,000 core IT jobs in January 2020, according to industry trade association CompTIA. One month later, as the economic repercussions of the pandemic grew exponentially, that plummeted to 40,000 new position postings.

In Being Digital, Mr. Negroponte mused “creativity often comes from unlikely juxtapositions.” Here’s an unorthodox pairing: align the “Great Pause” in business activity caused by Covid-19 to the digital transformation skills of technology workers.

Chief information officers should build a “digital transformation skills matrix” designed to identify IT staff members who possess the essential skills needed to implement digital transformation platforms in the post-Covid-19 era.

Here’s how to do it. Plot the Y-axis of the matrix, on a scale of zero to 10, to represent what Thomas Lynch, the chief information officer for Suffolk University in Boston, calls the “cultural capacity” of an employee to communicate, collaborate, think critically and be creative. Along the X-axis, also on a scale of zero to 10, identify the “technical capacity” of an individual to work competently with discreet technologies needed in digital transformation project.

Staff members with skill set coordinates that place them to the upper right quadrant–strong technical and cultural capacity skills–are vital retention priorities. Workers in the upper left quadrant–strong cultural capacity skills but weaker technical skills–should be deployed in customer and employee-facing roles. Individuals whose skills align them to the lower right quadrant–strong technical capacity but weak cultural skills–should be assigned to review emerging technology and build internal digital transformation platforms. Those who fall to the lower left quadrant–weak technical and cultural capacity skills–are candidates for reduction in force.

Recently Mr. Negroponte commented on the future impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. “Many firms are trying to think how the world will be different afterward,” he said. “The one common belief is that it will not be the same. The pandemic has brought an appreciation for technology, in general, and the internet in specific.”

And technology will help point the way forward, said Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive officer of Google. “Every American should be asking where we want the nation to be when the Covid-19 pandemic is over,” he said. “How could emerging technologies propel us into a better future?”

To ensure a “better future” for digital transformation projects, chief information officers must also ask, and answer, those questions. Then start now to reconfigure their staff to prioritize digital transformation skills.

The Wall Street Journal

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If you are leading your organization through a change in technology and culture, you know how difficult the process can be, especially now as we weather all the additional changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Applying a little emotional intelligence can make a world of difference in reaching your team goals, especially in these trying times. The following six principles can help make your organization stronger and more competitive:

1. Be open

Allow for freedom of thought, action, and innovation. Foster an environment in which every individual in your organization feels they have the autonomy to affect change. Most organizations do not prioritize an “open” workplace culture. If you begin to prioritize openness, employees joining the organization must be aware and brought into the new culture you are creating. Being aware of your own openness and the rest of your organization’s current culture is key to digital transformation.

Seek out feedback from your team members, and show an openness and willingness to accept it. This will help instigate larger changes within your organization. Another behavior that exhibits openness is being diligent about retrospectives and tracking the changes needed based on those retrospectives, which leads to a healthier, more successful organization. Be diligent about gathering feedback and tracking the changes you make that are based on your retrospectives.

2. Be thoughtful

Constantly think about the goals you are trying to achieve, evaluate your progress toward those outcomes, and change course when necessary. If you feel like your organization is going through the motions without questioning why, you are likely moving in the wrong direction.

I recently spoke with the CTO of a Fortune 500 company who is leading a major digital transformation. Her primary focus is on mindful decision-making. Being mindful and transparent about her decisions has boosted employee morale and strengthened communications throughout the organization. It has also encouraged employees to offer critical feedback on training, which in turn led her to make changes that increased the organization’s recruiting pipeline and employee retention rate through creating a new platform for IT upskilling.

3. Be understanding

If you take the time and effort to understand others’ perspectives, you will be much more likely to receive the buy-in and creativity necessary to instigate change. Understand where your coworkers, your customers, and your vendors are coming from. If you can acknowledge your differences and have a shared understanding of success, you will see that diversity of thought makes teams more effective and organizations stronger. Great ideas are implemented through cooperative creation.

4. Be inclusive

A diverse workforce is a more effective workforce. According to a report by McKinsey & Co., companies in the top quartile for gender and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.

Diversity promotes inclusive thought and ideas, which are essential in today’s workforce. To attract and retain talent, encourage diversity and inclusive thought by promoting positive actions by your employees, contractors, and vendors. Modern meritocracy is not necessarily about listening only to the loudest ideas, but rather allowing the best ideas to form through inclusive thought.

5. Accept failure

We’ve all heard about the importance of accepting failure: Failure is a sign of progress because it shows that you tried to improve, which leads to positive learning as an organization.

At regular intervals throughout your transformation, detail what is working well and what is not, and revisit these notes at regular intervals and at the end of the project. Start by collecting data to understand how many people on your team are willing to admit that they had to change course, or that someone else had to fix a bug or an issue. Team members’ willingness to speak up will reflect whether you are ready to accept failure and move forward. The more transparently tracked data you collect, the more accepting you likely are.

The real benefit of this strategy is that failure can happen quickly, and your team can move on instead of wasting time, money, and other resources on an approach that ultimately won’t work. Insisting that “failure is not an option” will only lead to overspending on resources and missed deadlines as your team gets stuck in a cycle of great effort with little change.

6. Celebrate success

Celebrating success should be the easiest part of priming your teams for change, but the reality is that almost half of American employees today feel underappreciated.

In a workplace study conducted by Clear Review, a lack of appreciation regarding effort and performance topped the list of workplace frustrations. And an article in business.com reported, “A remarkable 40 percent of employees, from a diverse range of fields and positions, stated that employee recognition was simply not a priority in their business, something that limited their motivation to truly excel.”

Employees who feel that their efforts and achievements are not recognized – or worse, that they are recognized only when something goes wrong – are more likely to underperform. So make a point to celebrate employee success at the individual, team, organizational, and corporate level – it will help encourage everyone to excel.

The business of change

Transformation – whether it involves new technology, cultural change, or other factors – is never easy. But using the principles outlined above, you can help your teams adapt and even grow stronger and more productive.

The most effective digital leaders facilitate change through openness and collaboration. They are willing to accept failure and use its lessons to help their teams succeed. And they understand that change is imperative to stay competitive in the age of digital disruption.

The Enterprise Project

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When I sat down to write this article, a follow-on to my previous article on common leadership oversights on the path to digital transformation, the coronavirus’s threat to global business had not reached the magnitude that we feel and see today. In a few short weeks, the pandemic has forced a new virtual work reality on businesses and entire operating models have been shifted – and in many cases, upended.

A business environment that is changing so dramatically and rapidly requires speed, innovation on the fly, and the need to scale thinking beyond anything we might have previously imagined. Now is not the time to back-burner digital initiatives but to ramp them up.

When the crisis eases, we will have entered a new digital normal. The strategies we use to run, change, and staff the business will need to reflect this shift. Consider the following factors as you plan for the longer term:

1. The right financials

Any business that isn’t digital by now likely won’t be a business for long. Learning to embrace and adjust is imperative. Continuing – or starting – a digital transformation will be more important than ever, and you’ll need to rethink your business’ capital allocation strategies for digital initiatives and the staffing that supports them.

To figure this out, become best friends with your finance team and think for both the short- and long-term. In the current climate, it can be easy to be either too short-sighted or too far-sighted, but you need to plan for the next week, month, quarter, year, three and five years.

Consider how your company may bounce back from the pandemic when stay-at-home orders are lifted, kids go back to school, and consumers begin to mobilize again: We will have entered an entirely different digital world, with new digital expectations from consumers. Is there potential for a rapid and significant surge, followed by a normalization? Will you be facing a slow rise? Digital transformation funds need to be allocated to react appropriately to these various scenarios; staffing discussions should follow based on these decisions.

2. The right tools

It is likely that at least some of your employees will remain virtual, even when the majority can get back into the office. How will you support them? You may have sacrificed some tools or technologies in your move to quickly get employees out of your building and into their homes; you may have also overpaid for the sake of quick deployment.

You’ll need to rework your strategy for the long term. This could include better or more consistent access to networks and servers, the capacity to host formal business meetings online, new portable equipment, virtual collaboration and communication software, and more.

For many, this will require working with your corporate legal team to change their thinking. Where they may have once been risk-averse for the sake of the business, they will now need to take smart risks, also for the take of the business. State your case, find common ground, and move forward.

In some particularly dire situations, you may even need to become comfortable with making decisions first and asking for permission later.

3. The right staffing

You’ll need to continue to make smart staffing decisions – quickly. You likely have three types of talent available:

• Employees who are great at running the business
• Employees who are hungry for more
• New talent that may not yet exist in your business but needs to be brought in

Unfortunately, this global crisis may have created gaps in your workforce.

Identify the individuals in the first two groups and work with your talent management team to assess whether you need to advance digital investments previously planned for. Do these individuals have the right type of skills for their teams? Are they collaborative and communicative? IT cannot work in a silo, and team members need to be able to communicate what they are doing and why, and be clear on how their actions are aligned to larger goals.

When you’ve completed this review, identify the additional skills you will need for the future. This might include teams familiar with building out cloud deployments or working with microservices, etc. Push the rest of your leadership team to break through capital allocation constraints to bring in new employees who not only have the right experience but also can quickly teach your existing teams on new tools organically.

4. The right brand permission

As you work through your accelerated digital transformation, you’ll start to think about your business as a truly digital brand. In fact, you might already think so, simply because you’ve been able to get your staff up and running remotely.

But is this the perception all your stakeholders have? According to the Yale School of Management, “Brand permission defines the limits of customers’ willingness to accept a familiar brand name in new marketplace situations.” For example, you can’t simply say, “We are digital now, world!” and expect your market to immediately accept that if you haven’t been digital historically. You need to earn this right.

Brand permission is something you and the rest of the company will need to work on – largely focused on delivering useful and impactful digital products and services – in order to attract the new talent you need. Start thinking about this now.

The global pandemic has thrown us into an entirely new world. Business leaders can no longer rest on their laurels and, certainly, can no longer put off or draw out a digital transformation. Making the right decisions now will help to ensure your business is positioned well when this crisis passes.

The Enterprises Project

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Let’s face it: technology—especially AI—has gotten a bad rap in certain circles, and in some cases for valid reasons. This is because the technology is advancing so quickly, regulation hasn’t had a chance to keep up with it. Thus, we as a society have met some moral dilemmas. Should we allow for the use of facial recognition? What about emotional recognition? Should we allow for fully autonomous vehicles? And when it comes to automation, how far is too far? Do we draw the line at automated robots in a manufacturing environment, or allow AI-bots to perform surgery or direct acts of warfare? These are all hard questions. But in the last few weeks, many of these concerns have fallen by the wayside as people have realized that technology could save us or even just help us live healthy, safer lives.

Sure, some companies hadn’t started to digitally transform yet, but the ones who had when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out have been pushed farther than ever expected. These companies have created new technologies, found ingenious uses for existing technologies, and have overall pushed their companies forward in new directions that would only be possible under these circumstances. We recently covered these in depth on the Six Five Podcast, but we couldn’t possibly cover all of the good things the tech industry is doing.

And the best part? Most of the digital transformations I’m seeing are happening for the good of the people. Here are some of the inspiring examples that have surfaced just in the last month.

Telehealth and Robotic Healthcare Making Big Strides

As this virus has progressed and personal protective equipment has become sparse, doctors and nurses all over the world have been faced with a dilemma: how to treat patients without endangering themselves. Some hospitals have turned to robotics. In Washington, a hospital started using robots equipped with iPads in patient rooms. Doctors would stand outside the room, operating the robot and using the iPad to video chat with the patient. The robot was even equipped with a stethoscope to allow doctors to take vitals.

That’s not the only major stride in healthcare. Researchers from all over the world have started using AI to help analyze data sets, x-rays and other patient information to help doctors get a better understanding of the virus. This technology is helping clinicians better understand the spread of the virus and how certain patients are reacting to treatments.

Natural Language Processing and Chatbots

All over the world, healthcare companies, doctors, and government officials are being overwhelmed by calls and questions about the virus. Companies like IBM and Apple stepped up and offered technology as a solution. The Watson Assistant for Citizens campaign allows companies to use natural language processing and AI capabilities to speed up wait times in call centers. Many companies who had never explored the option of NLP or AI assistance are now seeing first-hand what it can do for them.

Apple created a screening tool with the hopes to alleviate some of the stress on the healthcare system. People can answer a few questions about their symptoms and then access a number of telehealth apps to be connected to a doctor without endangering other people by spreading the virus outside of their homes.

Ingenious Manufacturing

We’ve all seen the news — states and hospitals are running out of supplies. Doctors and nurses don’t have the protective equipment they need to be able to treat patients and keep themselves safe. We don’t have enough ventilators to help patients suffering from COVID-19. These are the terrifying headlines that have been plaguing our world for weeks. But companies have stepped up to plug the critical gaps in the supply chain. Companies like HP have started using their 3D-printing capabilities to manufacture the swabs needs for testing. Dyson quickly pivoted and created a new ventilator. Companies like Burton and Fanatics have stopped manufacturing clothes to make protective masks.

Emergency Response

I’m a huge proponent of IBM’s Call for Code program, which has seen tremendous success in the past couple years. The entire program itself is focused on digital transformation for good—namely, helping first-responders and local victims during times of disaster and emergency evacuation. This year’s initiative has changed to include fighting COVID-19. People all over the world can access open source technology to create solutions crisis communication, remote education, and community cooperation. I can’t wait to see what people develop.

The winner of the very first competition, Project OWL developed an idea to keep WiFi up and running in times of disaster to facilitate recovery. OWL (organization, whereabouts, and logistics) is a two-part solution that provides offline communication structure for first responders via a physical “clusterduck” network of hubs that can float in flooded areas if needed. The ducks create a mesh network that can send speech communication to a central app. The app then uses analytics and data resources to create a dashboard for responders. The project is just one example of the good that can come from coders and technologies huddling together to develop digital transformation for good.

In the past few weeks, IBM in partnership with SAP and UNESCO has upped the ante in the field of mobilizing the code community to help with the COVID-19 pandemic by launching “Code the Curve,” which is a hackathon for ideas that can help now and in the future with global crisis like the one we are currently dealing with.

What This All Means

Take a second to think about what you’ve just read. Healthcare companies started using technology to treat patients. Tech companies started working with healthcare providers to examine data to find a solution. Companies that have had a completely different goal or manufactured products not remotely close to the medical field have, in the matter of a few days, started to produce the supplies we need.

These pivots can only happen in one kind of organization. The organizations that have embraced digital transformation. These are the organizations who were ready for technology. These are the organizations who looked a piece of technology and said this can be used differently. They have the leaders who were ready for change. They have the cultures that were ready to step up. This is what digital transformation for good looks like. I, for one, hope it continues long after this crisis is over.

Forbes

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But as a recent experiment we conducted with medical coders demonstrates, emerging AI tools and techniques, coupled with careful attention to human factors, are opening new possibilities to train AI with small data and transform processes.

For every big data set (with one billion columns and rows) fueling an AI or advanced analytics initiative, a typical large organization may have a thousand small data sets that go unused. Examples abound: marketing surveys of new customer segments, meeting minutes, spreadsheets with less than 1,000 columns and rows. In our experiment, it was annotations added to medical charts by a team of medical coders — just tens of annotations on each of several thousands of charts.

Medical coders analyze individual patient charts and translate complex information about diagnoses, treatments, medications, and more into alphanumeric codes. These codes are submitted to billing systems and health insurers for payment and reimbursement and play a critical role in patient care.

Coders in our experiment, all of whom were registered nurses, were already accustomed to drawing on an AI system for assistance. The AI scanned charts and identified links between medical conditions and treatments and suggested the proper code for a given chart.

We wanted to see whether it was possible to transform the coders, responsible for the accurate, one-at-a-time assessment of charts, into AI trainers capable of enriching the AI with medical knowledge that would improve the system’s performance at identifying links.

What we learned over the course of the 12-week experiment is that creating and transforming work processes through a combination of small data and AI requires close attention to human factors. We believe that three human-centered principles that emerged from the experiment can help organizations get started on their own small data initiatives:

Balance machine learning with human domain expertise. A number of AI tools have been developed for training AI with small data. For example, few-shot learning teaches AIs to identify object categories (faces, cats, motorcycles) based on only one or a few examples instead of hundreds of thousands of images. In zero-shot learning, the AI is able to accurately predict the label for an image or object that was not present in the machine’s training data. In other words, it can correctly identify things it has never seen before. Transfer learning involves transferring knowledge gained from one task to the learning of new tasks — for example, identifying subtypes of cancer, based on knowledge of another type — which eliminates the machine’s need for a vast set of new data for performing the new task.

In our experiment, we employed a tool commonly called a knowledge graph, which explicitly represents the various relationships between different types of entities: “Drug A treats condition B,” “Treatment X alleviates symptom Y,” “Symptom Y is associated with condition B,” etc. It succinctly captures expert knowledge and makes that knowledge amenable to machine reasoning — for example, about the likelihood of a specific condition being present given the drugs and treatments prescribed.

To enable the coders to impart their knowledge to the AI, we developed an easy-to-use interface that allowed them to review contested links in the graph’s database. These were links where their colleagues, when reviewing individual charts, had disagreed with the AI — either by adding links unknown to the system, or by removing links it had added. Based on their expertise, the coders could directly validate, delete, or add links and provide a rationale for their decisions, which would later be visible to their coding colleagues. In addition, they were encouraged to follow their inclination to use Google (often with WebMD) to research drug-disease links, going beyond what they regarded as the existing AI’s slow look-up tool.

This combination of machine learning and human expertise has a significant multiplier effect. Instead of merely assessing single charts, coders added medical knowledge that affects all future charts. Further, with the AI taking on the bulk of the routine work, the need for screening of entire medical charts is greatly reduced, freeing coders to focus on particularly problematical cases. Meanwhile, data scientists are freed from the tedious, low-value work of cleansing, normalizing, and wrangling data.

Focus on the quality of human input, not the quantity of machine output. In the existing system, coders focused on the assessment of individual charts in high quantity. Over time, the AI learned from the accumulation of links added or rejected by a multitude of coders: Once a drug-disease link that the AI was not familiar with had been proposed a significant number of times by coders, a data scientist added it to the graph database. This manual process was undertaken only occasionally, in part because of the time lag in accumulating link proposals, and it relied on quantitative support for the link, rather than on medical expertise.

In the new system, coders were encouraged to focus less on volume of individual links and more on instructing the AI on how to handle a given drug-disease link in general, providing research when required. Links could now be considered for addition to the knowledge graph AI with a lesser burden of quantitative evidence. The AI would learn more regularly and dynamically, especially about rare, contested, or new drug-disease links.

Recognize the social dynamics in play on teams working with small data. In their new roles, the coders quickly came to see themselves not just as teachers of the AI, but as teachers of their fellow coders. Most importantly, they saw that their reputations with other members of the team would rest on their ability to provide solid rationales for their decisions. They spoke often of the importance of those rationales to the confidence of a subsequent coder encountering an unfamiliar link.

After only a few experimental sessions, a number of the participants asked that the number of characters in the tool’s rationale textbox be increased. Later, they asked that the research box be altered to accommodate more than one reference. Notably, they not only began to devote more time to each case than they had with the existing system, but to provide even more comprehensive rationales for their decisions as the experiment unfolded. Moreover, coders indicated they felt more satisfied and productive when executing the new tasks, using more of their knowledge, and acquiring new skills to help build their expertise. They also felt more positive about working with AI on a daily basis.

As small-data techniques advance, their increased efficiency, accuracy, and transparency will increasingly be put to work across industries and business functions. Think drug discovery, industrial image retrieval, the design of new consumer products, and the detection of defective factory machine parts, and much more.

But competitive advantage will come not from automation, but from the human factor. For example, as AI plays an increasingly bigger role in employee skills training, its ability to learn from smaller datasets will enable expert employees to embed their expertise in the training systems, continually improving them and efficiently transferring their skills to other workers. People who are not data scientists could be transformed into AI trainers, like our coders, enabling companies to apply and scale the vast reserves of untapped expertise unique to their organizations. Further, the results that emerge from small-data applications will come not from a black box, as they do in data-hungry applications, but from human-machine collaboration that renders those results explainable and therefore more trustworthy both inside and outside the organization.

Mastering the human dimensions of marrying small data and AI could help make the competitive difference for many organizations, especially those finding themselves in a big-data arms race they’re unlikely to win.

Harvard Business Review

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There a few reasons why the Coronavirus, or COVID-19 have forced companies to visit a digital transformation faster. One Forbes contributor Andrew Filev in his column “COVID-19 Is A Before and After Moment In The Digital Transformation” sees the most drastic change in four areas 1. telecommuting 2. on-demand food and services 3. virtual events 4. the cloud.

Telecommuting

Many people in industries that formerly prohibited are now working from home, from bankers, to engineers in aerospace, to almost every teacher in America, work-life has changed for most of us. In order to not only continue working, we are spending our social time on video calls as well, in order to not completely isolate.

On-Demand Food and Services

Grocery delivery is now the norm for many people who wouldn’t bother in the past. My own brother who lives in NYC ordered groceries from Amazon and said he could only get a delivery from 5am to 7am, but was frustrated when they arrived at 4:50am. At my own Whole Foods Market in Oakland on a recent Friday said they were “sold out” of delivery. Insurance companies who made it difficult for patients to be reimbursed for telehealth or remote services, will now need to change their tune and reimburse for things like remote therapy. Today if you can’t alter the way your products and services are delivered, you are dead in the water, as most of America and the world are under strict shelter-in-place orders.

Virtual Events

With no one flying, and gatherings prohibited, the events industry took a big hit this Spring. But many companies have simply shifted their budgets to digital events or digital content. Only time will tell if the fall will be a very busy events season, or companies will decide they look doing more online events over in-person events, and we’ll see more innovation on the virtual events side. From an internal corporate perspective, every day I see people posting photos of their large online meetings with their coworkers, and fun stories from teams that are learning to enjoy this new way of working.

The Cloud

Without the cloud during the Coronavirus pandemic, companies would struggle to share and co-edit documents securely, access analytics and much more. Even short physical distances would present a challenge for collaboration between coworkers without the cloud. Real-time wouldn’t be as easy, streaming would be a problem, smart phones wouldn’t be smart, and rapid data to name a few.

For many of you that are not used to a digital way of work, COVID-19 might have expedited your timeline for a digital transformation – and that’s not a bad thing.

Digital transformation seems to be the current business buzzword. But not all digital transformations are created equally.

According to research in Harvard Business Review, of the $1.3 trillion spent on digital transformation in 2018, an estimated $900 billion was wasted when initiatives didn’t meet their goals. You don’t want this to be your company.

Although most companies understand the importance of digital transformation, many are overwhelmed by the idea of having to revamp their entire digital approach and flounder without knowing how to implement a transformation. But they also realize that if they don’t do anything, they run the risk of being disrupted and replaced.

The goal of a digital transformation is to use technology to solve traditional problems, which means integrating technology into every area of the business. When done right, digital transformation allows companies to provide unprecedented value to customers.

Companies start a digital transformation, but it’s never truly over. A true digital transformation is a state of mind for a company to continually evolve and adopt new digital solutions internally and externally. One of the first goals of digital transformation is to break down internal silos to create a seamless internal experience. When a company works well internally, it greatly affects the external customer experience. Every area of the company has a role to play in digital transformation, and they each impact the customer in unique ways. Lasting digital transformations are customer-focused with an eye towards the future.

Digital transformation doesn’t have to be overwhelming. It’s not something to check off a list, but instead a mindset that becomes part of the organization’s culture and experience. When a company approaches a transformation with that in mind, it creates a much more manageable transformation. Many of you are now working against the clock, and my 12 steps might get you there faster.

Here are my 12 steps to digital transformation, adapted from my book The Customer Of The Future:

1. Customer focus. Before a digital transformation can truly begin, the company must switch its mindset from being product-focused to being customer-focused. The driving force behind technology decisions should be customers, and the goal should be to make their lives easier instead of making things easier for the organization. A customer focus is the basis for all other digital transformation decisions.
2. Organizational structure. Companies need to break down internal silos to create a cohesive organization that embraces change. That means getting executives and leaders on board with the new digital vision.
3. Change management. Change is hard, no matter how much it will benefit the company. One of the most common reasons digital transformations fail is because employees don’t support them. The most effective change management efforts are aligned with the modern, dynamic business environment.
4. Transformational leadership. A successful digital transformation starts from the top with leaders who drive employees towards the vision. Every executive and leader must play a role in championing digital change and uniting the digital transformation with the company’s larger, long-term goals.
5. Technology decisions. Digital transformation impacts the entire organization, not just one department. An average of 15 people are involved in most technology purchase decisions, which means that everyone’s voices need to be heard.
6. Integration. All data systems need to work together and be integrated into the company’s internal processes. A streamlined data strategy is required for a successful digital transformation.
7. Internal customer experience. When focusing on digital solutions for customers, companies also need to consider their internal customers—employees. Getting employee feedback and providing consumer-grade technology solutions empowers employees to provide an amazing experience.
8. Logistics and supply chain. Digital transformation can be powerful in improving the speed and reliability of the supply chain, from how fast products are manufactured to the speed and efficiency of order fulfilment and delivery. To fully leverage a transformation, companies need to look at how the supply chain can be digitized and improved.
9. Data security, privacy and ethics. Adopting new digital solutions opens the doors to new questions about data security. Most consumers think their personal data is at risk, which means that adopting company-wide standards for privacy and security should be top of mind. With the many examples of “Zoom Bombing” last week, with hackers sneaking into people’s private meetings — again we are reminded that any data breach or hack can erode your brand. School districts are now looking to alternatives to Zoom.
10. Evolution of products, services and processes. Digital transformation requires a change in thinking about how an organization delivers its products and services, and even the products and services themselves. Successful companies push past what’s always been done to find the most efficient and innovative solutions.
11. Digitization. Digital transformation touches all areas of the organization and blurs the line between digital and physical stores. That means moving past segmented operations to digitize every aspect of the business.
12. Personalization. Digital transformation provides unparalleled opportunities to offer personalized service to customers. Leverage digital solutions to understand customers and provide recommendations and experiences that are unique to them.

Digital transformation is an ongoing process, which means continually working through these 12 steps. Change and venturing into the unknown can be difficult, but the benefits that come from creating a forward-thinking, customer-focused, digital company can be lasting. Perhaps this is the silver lining for businesses in the age of COVID-19, forced change can be positive – for your employees, partners and customers.

Forbes

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Hung said the pandemic was posing considerable challenges but there were also opportunities.

“COVID-19 helps us change our thinking. It is a breaking point in the development process and many habits will change,” he said. “This provides the biggest opportunity to accelerate digital transformation and bring socio-economic activities online.”

“The world is now hard to predict, turbulence has become normal. We will have to face this coronavirus pandemic crisis, then we will learn how to increase resistance, toughness, creativity, adaptiveness and recovery ability,” he said.

“Digital technology will help solve the problems quickly,” he stressed. “It is time for the Government, enterprises and society to invest more intensively in digital technology.”

In the context of the pandemic, Hung said the Government would decide some digital transformation policies currently under consideration more quickly, such as cashless payment, mobile money, certification for online learning, banning outdated technology imports, promoting the production of low-priced smartphones and e-Government.

For example, the number of files for public services submitted online doubled in the past month, equal to the total figure of the previous 20 years.

Cashless payment and e-Government were highlighted as important solutions to fight the spread of COVID-19. Recently, banks slashed online transactions fees to promote cashless payment.

As technology shapes a stay-at-home economy in the COVID-19 outbreak, Hung urged Vietnamese firms to increase innovations to provide more online platforms for education, health, shopping and recreation.

The need for digital transformation was pressing as the pandemic would not only create a health crisis but also an economic crisis, which would result in increasing unemployment, he said.

“Success often comes from a crisis. It’s a precious opportunity for digital companies,” Hung said.

Dau Anh Tuan, head of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Legal Department, said encouraging the participation of enterprises in digital transformation and opening digital economy platforms would bring significant efficiency.

However, Tuan said the current legal system needed timely amendments to manage new business models efficiently and ensure the development of the digital economy is on track.

A clear example was tech-based cars like Grab and Be. It took six years for lawmakers to complete a decree regulating the operation of vehicles providing passenger transportation services via ride-hailing apps which will come into effect from the beginning of April.

Economic expert Vo Tri Thanh said the digital economy was an indispensable global trend and Vietnam could not stand outside, adding that successful digital transformation brought significant benefits to businesses like 30 percent higher labour productivity.

However, digital transformation was not simple, he said, adding that only half of enterprises embarking in the process succeeded.

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