Every business wants to climb out of the crises that we’ve been mired in since 2020. For many business leaders, the solution lies in digital-led innovations. The challenge is not so much in finding the next big idea but more in bringing together the people, skills and expertise and technologies to make it all work with minimum waste, acceptable risks and time-to-market speeds that catapult you to industry innovators and disruptors.
The answer may lie in environments that allow us to experiment with the possibilities without disrupting business as usual.
Garage Thinking is a way to accelerate innovation, unrestricted by the demands of short-termism, bureaucracy and limiting silos.
So how to turn ideas into realities is the subject of our CXOVIEWS dialogue with Charu Mahajan, Partner, IBM Garage & Corporate Ventures, and Sector Leader at IBM Consulting.
In case you are wondering, IBM Garage is an end-to-end model for accelerating digital transformation. It helps you generate innovative ideas and equips you with proven practices and technologies, and the experts to guide you, to rapidly turn the ideas into realities.
The concept of digital transformation has been around for decades now. Do you see a decline or increase in interest in digital transformation among businesses in Asia?
Mahajan is of the opinion that coming out of Covid, the pace of acceleration, the degree of adoption and the scale of digital transformation has only gone up.
“If anything, what we are seeing in the market is that more and more businesses are wanting to now go digital sooner, faster, cheaper, and to ensure that they have a competitive edge in the market as they emerge from Covid.”
What have we learned so far with regard to digital transformation? What has worked for enterprises in the region?
Over the last ten years, we’ve seen seasons of transformation.
Season one was when the transformation was happening at the edges of the enterprise. It was a lot of cool people doing cool things, but the impact on the value of transformation did not stick because it wasn't endemic to the organisation.
The second season of transformation, where I think most companies are at today, is where the organisation has begun to happen within the edges of the organisation.
It's functional groups trying to transform. For example, CFOs want to transform the finance function. Supply chain officers want to transform the supply chain. It's beginning to happen in big functions, and this is where we are seeing a lot of agile coaches, transformation experts, and consulting firms come in and advise clients on how they need to make the transformation.
But that widespread change in skills, that adoption of technology, which is intrinsic to the organisation, requires a change in the way organisations are structured, in the way you're making sure the transformation is not getting impeded for scale and speed, is still not happening.
When these experts will go away, we find that many organisations are reverting to their old behaviour.
We still don't have that, that transformation that is enterprise-wide, that it's scaled where we've broken down silos between functions. So that's what we call the second season of transformation.
True transformation is when it occurs at the centre of the enterprise. It's the transformation you can see, you can feel, you can hear. It's where top-down leadership is decided that the transformation must be at the core of the enterprise.
It is transformation, which is happening from within, where we are looking at prioritization of initiatives, making sure the transformation is tied to value, which will truly help the organisation's top line or bottom line.
It's transformation, which is being supported by a change in skill sets. We are not only looking at skill sets, that are highly technology-focused or function-focused but more O-shaped skill sets – the ability of people to work with each other collaboratively in agile ways of working.
That's the kind of transformation we are seeing in the third season.
This transformation is happening from within, and we are making sure that this transformation is almost like a fishbowl in a large enterprise. But what's required for this transformation to stick all is that the walls of the fishbowl must be strengthened, to not make old ways of working come back again, and seep in again.
We need to make sure that it's governed for speed, it's governed for scale. And that we've got the right skill sets and the right methodologies to ensure that everybody top down and bottom up is making sure that there are no impediments, and that value is constantly being captured in these new ways of working.
Click on the video to hear Mahajan describe in detail how leadership can manage the transformation journey. There is also a bonus segment where she describes the role that IBM Garage plays in helping enterprises navigate their journey in a controlled manner.
