What is the moonshot trend? Let’s back up a minute.
Typically, and this isn’t bad practice, organisations start their digital transformation in a single effort around digital. Success in one department or one function, for example.
What then tends to happen, however, is that other business unit leaders piggyback on the success of that initial digital transformation effort, and exclaim their desire ‘to go digital.’ This is bad practice, says Dan Hushon, CTO at DXC Technology.
“What this leads to is a fractal model that is not knit together for the company.”
This fractal, somewhat siloed approach, leads to a massive accumulation of technical debt and doesn’t solve the critical problem. Which is? To organise and orchestrate the entire corpus of data that an organisation has in such a way that all the business units can use it.
What is digital transformation in business: Everything you need to know
Organisations are experiencing this conundrum and are beginning to concentrate digital initiatives that are “aligned around common launch themes with a much more common operating model underneath it,” says Hushon.
This represents a new era of decentralisation and recentralisation in the enterprise.
And that is what the moonshot trend is: digital shouldn’t be something that one business unit does or that 100 business units do independently, but instead something that an organisation does as a whole, “led by the core leadership team in which everyone understands digital, and everybody knows how to go forward,” explains Hushon.
The moonshot trend — the right way to approach digital transformation — is going to change organisational structures.
Hushon believes it may re-concentrate or repurpose the CDO, “who I think has lost some of their significance over the last two years”, to the point where they own the common digital themes and the digital commons for their company.
He also thinks that we’re going to see investment from IT in a new set of digital foundational platforms, around key things that the organisations need in order to knit and stitch their digital model together.
“They need the workflow platform, they need a process platform and I think they need an employee workplace platform,” says Hushon.
Why these three? The combination will get:
- knowledge management to the front of the business,
- processes aligned to knowledge-based operations
- and provide the ability to operate an organisation’s data and services at scale.
Everybody in the organisation will then begin to line up with one common digital goal, “and when that happens, we begin to see outpaced execution,” says Hushon.
