Q&A with Allan Forbes on End-To-End Transformation

We speak to Allan Forbes, Country Leader of XpertiseNow Australia, about the importance of end-to-end transformation and the power of the network.

Q: How have digital transformations changed from the original “big bang” approach?

A: There are a lot more disciplines in a transformation than 10-15 years ago. If you look at the old fashion digital transformation it was stock standard. It was all about “if we change the tech stack, and then we send out some comms that’ll do.” The reality is we’ve found that that’s not the reality.

Change and transformation is ultimately about behavioral change, the people in your business need to do something different with the technology with the systems period to get the business results that you need. What looks relatively straightforward will evolve on the way through, so you can start out with an ambition about what your end state looks like. But that evolves as you progress, and you understand your gaps and your strengths better.

You might start out thinking “we’ll just change these five things, engage some people do some change management. But as you get into the transformation you start realising you, we need deeper change management, we need a different kind of engagement with our own people. We need to have an evolved operating model, we may need to create an extended value chain, we need to revise our supply chain contracts. We may need customer experience insights that we weren’t aware that we were lacking, we might need branding and public relations experience or joint venture design. We could even have to do some mergers and acquisition to fill to fill some capability gaps or remove business units – or part of our tech stack or part of our joint venture framework that no longer match the new vision.

This makes it very hard for a one stop transformation, expert, or company organization to actually manage all of that.  But if you have access to a range of boutiques with deep expertise in different areas, it’s really a great way to mitigate risk and promote success from a transformation.

Ultimately, what you want to do is move yourself into a position where you have a better value proposition for your customers or your partners. Or your employees. If you have deep expertise available as you realize you needed on the way through. You ultimately get a better solution.

Q: How has this changed the way that companies look at their digital transformation and what they’re looking for in terms of expertise and consultants?

A: Companies that realize the difficulty in a transformation and realize just how flexible they need to be to get the results they’re after may well have a preferred partner in consulting. However, they will recognize that there needs some flexibility in that model so they’re looking for a range of options.

Businesses today are far more interested in flexibility. The other thing that they are interested in is who can bring something to the party that we haven’t thought of who can get us to think in different ways and better ways about what we’re trying to do. Having that trusted advisor, positioning in different areas is becoming increasingly well understood by companies.