How successful organisations approach digital transformation

Summary:

• Digital transformation is an unavoidable concept for modern businesses, and evolving constantly is key to success
• An organisation must have clear goals and an engaged board to support successful digital transformation
• IT is an enabler rather than a solution, and organisations must focus on fully utilising their existing tools rather than jumping to invest in new tools like AI

Successful AI adoption depends on knowing your existing systems and data end to end, and continual assurance of new AI systems

Digital transformation: the strategic integration of technology and processes to change how a business operates. It’s a term that’s unavoidable in the technology industry and, for businesses, a force that’s likely inescapable. 

‘It’s impossible to think about any sort of organisation change that doesn’t involve IT, data and AI’, says Rebecca George CBE FBCS. ‘It could be gradual evolution, or it could be large-scale change — there’s a continuum, but all organisations have to evolve all the time, or they probably won't survive.

‘When I talk to organisations about transformation, I say “start with your vision”. What do you want to achieve — do you want to improve your users’ experience, grow revenue, improve quality or performance? And then, how are you going to know that you’ve done it? You work from there.’
 
With a career including 20 years with IBM, 15 with Deloitte and which now sees her work as a non-executive director for various public sector bodies, the talk of starting points begs a question: how did her relationship with computers and technology begin? 

Winding the clock back, she says: ‘My Dad was a nuclear physicist. He was really interested in technology and was one of the first people to own a home computer — a BBC Micro. So I was used to computers being in the house from a really early age. That [familiarity] led to summer jobs with the AA, which had recently taken possession of a vast new computer system.

‘I was absolutely fascinated right from the start’, Rebecca says. ‘When I got to university, my college had a computer — but nobody knew how to use it. It belonged to the geography department — I was studying English! But I used to use it whenever I could — often at night. I’ve just loved what you can do with computers, all my life. They fascinate me.’

IT as an enabler

Returning to the here and now, Rebecca moves to dispel a myth about digital transformation: ‘The thing to remember is, IT isn’t the solution — IT is the enabler. It’s the people and processes, the finances and the environment… they are the drivers.’

Considering how a business can understand where it needs to begin with transformation, she says: ‘For me, transformation starts everywhere. If you’re doing things right, everybody in the organisation is constantly listening and in a learning mode. You need to listen to your customers, listen to your staff, and watch your competitors, and then you constantly stay open to interesting ideas.’ And then, she adds, there’s the other side of the coin — asking ‘what are we going to stop doing?’ is just as important.

Rebecca is also quick to point out that an organisation’s board needs to be engaged and supportive. For large-scale transformations, she believes that having an executive sponsor — somebody accountable for the project and, ideally, somebody with a good degree of digital awareness — is important. She expands that in the public sector, this is absolutely critical: when working with public money and accountability, the board must be fully engaged. They need to scrutinise the business and financial cases, maintain focus on benefits realisation — a vital element that too often gets overlooked — and uphold clear accountability. For Rebecca, these elements aren’t optional; they’re fundamental to ensuring transparency, efficiency, and trust.

In terms of transformation technology, Rebecca says that before diving headfirst into artificial intelligence, organisations should take a step back and ask: are we fully using the technology we already own? Many companies pay for sophisticated software but fail to leverage its full functionality, and unlocking value often starts with optimising existing tools rather than rushing to invest in new ones. In some cases, logic-based automation and algorithms can solve problems just as effectively as AI without the added complexity or risk. So, before asking what AI can do for you, consider whether older, proven technologies could meet your needs. ‘We need to use what we’re paying for properly,’ she says, ‘or we need to stop paying for it.’ 

Succeeding with AI

‘The big question is: who is using AI? What are the common attributes of organisations that are doing AI well? Often, it’s a desire to make sense of data — to see patterns in it, to look for new outcomes that can be derived from it. They might be trying to look at it in a different way, as we do in healthcare and diagnostics, or they might want to bring different datasets together and see what can be learned.’ 

The other attribute successful AI adopters possess, she says, is that they are businesses that have know their basics. In practical terms, this means being across fundamentals like understanding your IT infrastructure: knowing how everything fits together and how your data is being collected, stored and managed; knowing what links there are between databases; ensuring you’ve wrapped security around your most important information. Summarising, she says: ‘Forget to fix the fundamentals in any computer-based environment at your peril!’

When you are across the basics, Rebecca advises regularly testing systems with closed, well-defined and familiar datasets. When you know the data, where it comes from, and what’s happening, you can run pilots and observe how your users respond. ‘I’m very keen on continual assurance’, Rebecca explains emphatically. ‘We need to know that what we’re getting out of systems is what we expected them to produce. Is the answer we have the right one? Know your systems end to end. Know what’s going in, know what’s coming out.’

Preparing for change

All this leads to a final question (or concern). What about people? How can we best prepare ourselves for transformation?

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Looking back across her career, Rebecca says: ‘If I think back to the start of my career, if I tried to keep doing things the same way, I wouldn't have a job and I certainly wouldn't have had a career. We all change, all the time.’

The difficulty, she believes, is that people generally think of change as being negative — and it’s the job of leadership to frame it as positive. ‘Leaders need to be better at explaining the positive sides of change. Change is inevitable. We all have to be resilient. We all need to be adaptable. We all need to learn new things, whether it's the right words to use or the next piece of technology.’

Finishing, she says: ‘If we do it well — if our leaders do it well — we will all be equipped to take on new challenges, because challenges aren't going to go away.’

Skills development and the public sector

Martin also spoke to Sarah about her views on digital transformation in the public sector and how it might face challenges in a changing world.

Talk to us about skills and skills development. How do you view the relationship between skills and successful transformation?

Skills are my thing at the Department for Education. I focus on further education, technical and vocational skills, and I think skills development is absolutely key for everyone through their whole working lives, and all employers should be worrying about it.

In the world today, which is changing very fast, upskilling and keeping current — particularly around digital skills — is not a choice, it's something that everybody has to do. That said, as the AI environment unfolds, I think it's going to be increasingly important to focus on human skills too. What tasks and activities can only humans can do? It's quite hard to be a nurse, a teacher or a plumber without having personal activities involved in your work. Humans are going to come out on top in personal interactions — in empathy and relationships, the blink of an eye can convey a world of meaning. 

And, as good as Teams and Zoom are, it's not the same as being in the same room — particularly when you look at leaders. Good leaders inspire people. They motivate people. They involve themselves creatively. They get followership. That’s really hard to do from behind a screen. You need a person for that. 

In your experience, which is better — to be a first of a kind or a fast follower?

As a general rule of thumb — and there are always exceptions —  I would say to public sector organisations: be an intelligent fast follower rather than a first user. There are fewer risks involved. You can look at lessons learned.

If you do want to do something truly groundbreaking and innovative, if you want to transform the way your organisation works, some public sector organisations have done that. The DVLA, the Metropolitan Police and the education sector are some examples. But generally speaking, I'd say being a fast follower is less risky.

Do public sector organisations face particular, maybe unique challenges?

I'm endlessly fascinated by the public sector, partly because the scale of their challenges is so different from the private sector. I don't want to oversimplify the private sector, because it is complicated — but generally speaking, you need to make and keep your shareholders happy. In the public sector, you're doing things on a few other dimensions. You're in a political landscape, you've got regulation. This brings, for me, a richness of problems, challenge and scale. 

A key difference between private and public sector organisations, for example, is that public sector organisations don't have a choice of customers. They can't cherry pick the ones with more money or ones which are more attractive from a product perspective. You have to be able to provide for everyone. They have to be able to be available to everyone — you need to think about deprivation and the digitally left behind, as well as everyone else. This also means that, before you know it, most public sector systems are huge; they have to scale really quickly. They're dealing with massive amounts of data, money and people... and they're all on journeys to move their infrastructure into the cloud [or adopt] off-the-shelf software for big public sector end user populations.

As I say, I find it endlessly fascinating.