It feels like everybody’s in the midst of a digital transformation these days. I had the privilege of having a front-row seat to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs successful transformation when I was its Chief Technology Officer and have since served as a crisis engineer on many failing digital transformations. Here are five pitfalls I’ve seen firsthand, and how you can avoid them.
- Not knowing what it’s supposed to accomplish
Why are you embarking on a digital transformation? Is it to save costs? To increase customer service? To achieve operational efficiencies? Too often, digital transformation is seen as a goal in and of itself. But spending a decade and millions of dollars to recreate the status quo in a slightly newer technology doesn’t actually accomplish anything.
Instead, set a crisp goal. When your digital transformation is complete, what does the world look like? What has changed for the better, in what ways, and for whom?
- Not being able to measure progress against what it’s supposed to accomplish
Think carefully about exactly how you’re measuring. For example, in government, we all know that cost savings is rarely measured across the board — you might save in one area but not be able to apply those savings in a novel way. This might be fine in your agency, or it might create perverse incentives that ultimately make your transformation unsuccessful as people rationally refuse to change or turn off their systems.
- Thinking the goal is to replace your legacy technology
This is a mistake I see organizations make again and again. The fact that your technology is older, or includes a mainframe (or even multiple mainframes) is not inherently bad or cause for change. Much of Western civilization operates on mainframes right this minute. What specifically are you trying to accomplish? Improved uptime? A larger pool of potential hires familiar with the technology? Cost savings? Reduced time to deploy changes to production? Speedier reporting?
It’s highly possible to do all of these things with your existing technology, and you should try that first. Then aim to transform the specific parts that your current infrastructure truly can’t handle.
- Trying to plan everything upfront
Spending years planning every detail of a comprehensive digital transformation that takes into account every component of your agency and every requirement you need to fulfill has worked exactly zero times. Ever. Yet we continue considering this approach to be the path of lowest risk.
A successful digital transformation has a goal, and a way to measure that goal, but it also acknowledges that you can’t know everything upfront. As you build it, you’ll uncover new challenges, and also new opportunities to do work in different and better ways. Instead of trying to plan everything upfront, make a plan to build one complete component piece, feature, or function, and build in flexibility along the way to solve unexpected problems and to try out unexpected solutions.
- Not using a digital transformation to drive policy and practice change
The priority of your digital transformation shouldn’t really be the “digitizing” part. How can you use this window of change to develop and codify brand new ways of working and of serving your constituents? How might your agency accomplish its goals in an entirely different way? This can apply in a big sense — like fully automating an entire step or function — or in a smaller sense, such as usability testing your forms to make sure your users clearly understand the directions, or looking for ways to pre-populate existing data.
Marina Nitze, co-author of Hack Your Bureaucracy, is currently a partner at Layer Aleph, a crisis engineering firm that specializes in restoring complex software systems to service. Marina is also a fellow at New America’s New Practice Lab, where she works on improving America’s foster care system through the Resource Family Working Group and Child Welfare Playbook. Marina was the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs under President Obama, after serving as a Senior Advisor on technology in the Obama White House and as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the U.S. Department of Education.
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