Thread by @faizansiddiqi

Technology ≠ Transformation. There is no 1 to 1 corelation between having good technology & being able to transform your organization. In some cases if you have too much work happening under the hood, aka tech you are likely trying to leap to digital from a vastly analogue world

The real villain that most Csuite folks dont get is, Technical debt.Everyone in tech wants to tackle it but nobody plans to tackle it in the Csuite. That because the common misconception is that hire more people build more software, launch more apps, all will be well. Sadly not.

How many times have you seen seen any parts of time/budgets reserved to pay back an orgnanizations technical debt. So before we jump into further mechanics of what the problem is and a likely solution, here is what technical debt means.

Technical debt (also known as design/code debt, but can be also related to other technical endeavours) is a concept in sw dev that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) sol now instead of using a better approach that would take longer

If it sounds familiar to you/your organization,you surely aren't alone. Now mix in Cultural debt which is even worse. Especially in larger & older organisations with legacy systems & people. Combine all of these and it becomes Org Debt. This is what distracts CxOs from progress

When orgs are buried under "legacy mountains" quick solutions seem like progress But real progress comes from micro-production. Build fast, but accurate, fail fast but due to discovery not due to solving the wrong problem,ie discovering what else needs to solve for process issues

Along the way if you don't modernise you will see dwindling talent pools for legacy systems which will take you further from transformation goals. You will be left with systems, whose underlying process objectives no one knows or worse, left with users who don't know why these

systems work the way they do,or what the impact of changes to systems or process will mean to the wider organization.Transformation done right is to understand all these value levers on day one and prioritise to solve for them vs building new software to automate crappy processes

CXO Challenges remain :
1) Defining the Path from A-Z (start of tx to end of tx)
2) Board buy in viz a vi board ask to build more software
3) Reduction of technical debt by allocating budgets to it
4)Empowerment to execute cultural transformation
5) Access to process champions

Seems logical and easy on Paper. In practice not as much. This is compounded when boards favour consultants over common sense and over index on technical solutions or software to fix whats not broken. U only have to look at all the dodgy software being pushed as a panacea

Just throwing in buzz words & doing design workshops and Persona mapping etc only goes so far when you dont internalise the personas of the "real users" the employees of an org. When u build fast u also get Poor UX, which is often a symptom of a lack of UX expertise/understanding

Methodologies and frame works are great, for eg. Agile only provides a part of the puzzle. You still need great talent and leadership to understand how to deploy all these things. CDOs/CIOs/TX Experts cant do any thing in isolation.Transformation must be an Operational mandate

as much as it is a CEO mandate or board mandate. Till you pair the the right operational grit with the right TX empowerment or ownership you will get back to point 1. Too much technical debt. Its a vicious circle. If you are starting down the path of digital transformation

understand that it is Organisational transformation, HR Transformation,People & Ops transformation,Cultural & Board Transformation in the end its swimming against the current, best to have the right gear along with the knowledge of the ebb and flows of the organisational currents

Test the waters, apply the 80/20 rule but go for the jugular. Meaning fix the core vs fixing the optics. Optics distract, core enables. The methodology to use is not to unwind all of the ends of an Org but fractional pieces that deliver 80% of the value with 20% of the fixes.

Empowering teams is your biggest tool. Some times there isn't enough time. In that case bulldoze through the process to find aspects that will provide the 80% so you have bottom of the pyramid buy-in. People see what they use and use what works. So if it works you get buy-in.

The deeper problem is across functions due to near-term bias in action/Csuite horizons. If you don't solve for that, you will be building body armour for an ant @rebootdude @jehan_ara @Huk06 @fmsheik @TalhaIzhar @raza_matin @babushka99 @shahjahan_ch @nabeelaq @Ash_Kalim @alinawab