In this article, the author introduces the promotion of enterprise digital transformation from three aspects: organizational structure, business process standardization, and business process digitalization.
Nowadays, more and more enterprises are talking about digital transformation, but the transformation of most enterprises is not smooth. Those who are not involved tend to think that the key to digital transformation lies in technical capabilities, and that a good CTO and technical team play a decisive role, but this is not the case.
It is true that a CTO with strategic vision, in-depth understanding of the business, and a holistic view plays a vital role in the process of enterprise digital transformation, but it is not the decisive factor. Because the digital transformation of enterprises is not a simple technical problem, compared with overcoming technical problems, enterprises need to solve the resistance of organizational change more than overcoming technical problems.
In order for enterprises to succeed in digital transformation, the first step that needs to be achieved is the standardization of business processes, and the standardization of business processes cannot avoid the adjustment and even reform of business processes in various departments. This kind of multi-stakeholder matter, if the technology department alone wants to promote the change of the entire organization, it will inevitably be met with many obstacles and strengths, and there is no doubt that it needs to be promoted by consensus at the top level.
This article introduces the promotion of enterprise digital transformation from three aspects: organizational structure, business process standardization, and business process digitalization.
1. Organizational structure
For enterprises that are determined to digitally transform, they will basically set up a special technical department, so the department-level structure adjustment will not be repeated, and the main thing to talk about here is the structure of the digital transformation project team.
In order to promote the digital transformation of the enterprise relatively smoothly among various departments within the enterprise, the key is to solve the problem of consensus and goal consistency of all parties, and the decision-making can balance the interests of multiple parties, so the organizational structure of the digital transformation project team usually includes three layers, as shown in the figure below. The top layer is the digital transformation committee (decision-making level), the middle layer is the digital transformation working group (management), and the bottom layer is the data management team (executive layer).
1) Digital Transformation Committee
The Digital Transformation Committee includes senior stakeholders and is typically comprised of the lead sponsor of the digital transformation initiative, including business executive leadership and business unit leaders.
The committee is responsible for formulating the vision and goals of digital transformation, controlling the overall direction of the digital transformation plan, leading the digital transformation work, and formulating policies, standards, rules, and processes for digital transformation. Responsible for arbitration work when digital transformation encounters problems, and coordinate the interests and conflicts of various departments within the enterprise. The committee may include the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), finance, legal, HR teams, and representatives from various business units.
2) Digital Transformation Working Group
The working group includes members responsible for digital transformation, and the group leader is usually a member of the digital transformation committee, usually a CTO. The working group is mainly responsible for the daily management and operation of the digital transformation plan, submitting the requirements of digital transformation and relevant rules and regulations to the digital transformation committee for review and approval, and supervising the implementation of various digital transformation work.
3) Digital Transformation Team
The digital transformation team is typically composed of members of each business unit who drive its internal digital transformation, as well as the technical product team responsible for the application of digital product training.
The members of the business department are responsible for the sorting out of the business process and the internal promotion and use of system tools, and the members of the technical department are responsible for the development of relevant system products that adapt to the business process, and the product manager promotes and collects the use of products within the enterprise, continuously iterates the products, and optimizes the process standards together with the business department.
The digital transformation team should be a long-term, permanent team that meets regularly and works closely with management.
2. Standardization of business processes
The essence of enterprise digital transformation is to solidify the past offline and artificially passed on through word of mouth into a system process, realize node traceability, process control, and governance of business processes through data feedback from long-term system applications, and ultimately reduce costs and increase efficiency of enterprises.
Whether it is the system process that is launched after solidification, whether there will be frequent adjustments and consumption of development resources in the future, or whether business personnel are willing to apply the system to change past operation habits and improve operation efficiency, all depend on whether the solidified process is standardized on the basis of adapting to the operation habits of various departments as much as possible.
Of course, the final standardized process is likely to be completely consistent with existing work habits.
- First, since there was no standardized process before, it inevitably means that everyone will have differences in work due to different work habits, and there will inevitably be trade-offs;
- Second, since we have a certain amount of room for operation, it is natural to come how convenient it is, which often conflicts with the interests of the enterprise.
The purpose of digital transformation is more to improve the operational efficiency of enterprises, and the interests of organizations and individuals often conflict. In the process of business process standardization, it is natural to protect the interests of employees as much as possible under the premise of ensuring the interests of the enterprise, so the final standardized process will inevitably be different from the existing process.
3. Digitization of business processes
The digitalization of business processes is two-fold.
The first is the online and systematic business process.
This is more of a test of the technical team's product planning and R&D delivery capabilities, which can not be explained clearly in a few words, behind it is a set of B-end product demand research and product planning methodology, which will not be launched this time.
On the other hand, there is the design of the metrics.
In the process of digital transformation, most enterprises will encounter a lot of energy and money to develop a set of digital products, but the application situation is not optimistic. It won't be shelved, but it's easy to become a recording tool. At that time, the original intention of the development was to operate the corresponding system at the corresponding time and place by the corresponding person at each operation node, but due to various reasons, it finally became a post-event record to cope with the transfer (from the original record on paper to the record in the system). This kind of scenario is often written on paper when working, and entered into the system before getting off work, and only one thing was done in the past, but now it has become two, which not only does not reduce the workload, but adds an additional burden.
The reason for this situation is that the business process sorting link is not in place, and there are also reasons for everyone's rejection of new things. But whatever the reason, for digital transformation to continue, these problems are exposed to the obligations and responsibilities of each business unit, so that the responsibility can be defined according to the type of problem and an improvement plan can be formulated. For example, system problems are optimized by technology, training, and execution problems are solved by the heads of various business departments.
The whole process from front to back and back to front requires the mutual cooperation of all departments of the enterprise to make a hole, and this is not just a verbal lecture, but also needs to be matched with the corresponding index system and performance appraisal.
- The indicator system needs to cover all departments related to digital transformation, and in order to quantify the system application of each department, the product functions need to be matched with the corresponding roles and permissions at the beginning of product design.
- In the formulation of indicators, the data that can be directly captured by the system is preferred, because it is necessary to measure the benefits brought by digitalization and assess the use of digital products in various departments, so the system burying of user operation behavior is very important
The formulation of performance plans is inseparable from the HR team, which is why the digital transformation committee needs to include almost all senior management of the enterprise, not only HR, but also every department may affect the promotion of the digital transformation of the enterprise.
Digital transformation will involve the sorting out of business processes, and the sorting of business processes will inevitably implicate the rationality of the division of labor, so with the advancement of digital transformation, HR will inevitably need to reorganize departments and job responsibilities and formulate performance plans. In this process, the CTO, as the leader of the digital transformation working group, needs to fully interact with the HR department so that it can take into account the responsibilities related to the digital transformation of each department when formulating job responsibilities and performance plans.
To sum up, the digital transformation of an enterprise is not a matter of the technology department, but of the entire enterprise, which needs to be recognized and supported by various departments.
It is not only a technical problem, but also an organizational problem, which needs to be run through from the organizational structure, > business process standards, > business process digitalization, and take performance appraisal as the starting point.
Columnist
Listen to the tide, everyone is a product manager columnist, WeChat public account: 弈呓 (ID: YiYi_TANG7980), Internet operation practitioners
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