Welcome back to our 5 Top Challenges for Digital Leaders series!

We’re currently talking about building trust and credibility for your transformation programme.

Last week’s post was about digital strategy and how your journey is likely to be much more of a squiggly line than a straight one. (You can catch up here if you missed last week).

Since then I’ve been thinking about how just about every organisation now has digitisation and automation front and centre in their organisational strategy.

That’s a big change from when I first started in digital and we were well and truly under the radar. That had its own series of challenges (getting people to take you seriously and fund you, being one).

These days everyone is doing digital and it presents two key challenges when working with senior stakeholders. Leaders of digital have to do a lot more work to help stakeholders understand the challenges and opportunities that digitisation offers. And senior executives need to learn a lot more about digitisation.

Gone are the days when “the business” could just chuck the whole digital thing over the fence to technology and hope for the best.

Equally, tech teams can no longer just say “leave it to us” and “don’t you worry your pretty little business heads over this complicated tech stuff”.

Unfortunately, there’s a bunch of executives and, worse still, CDOs/CIOs who haven’t caught up with how times have changed.

Educated and capable non-tech executives can add a lot of value to digital transformation programmes. The more involved they are, the more likely you will solve genuine problems for your customers, staff and organisation. The more involved your non-tech colleagues are the more likely that your projects will get prioritised and your budgets will be funded.

Uneducated executives, on the other hand, can make it much harder to deliver. Your delivery teams become the recipients of 50-page business requirement documents, agile ways of working get diluted as your teams take time out to manage internal stakeholders, and real connections to real users fall by the wayside.
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One thing I’ve learned over the years, is that the more senior you are, the less likely you are to admit that your knowledge is insufficient. That means the onus is on you, transformation leaders, to ensure that the senior stakeholders in your organisation are well informed and able to contribute to the digital discussion.
 
So where to start?  Here’s seven things that every senior executive in your organisation needs to understand your digital transformation.

​The emphasis here is simplified. Not one drawn by your Head of Architecture. It doesn’t have to be technically accurate. It just needs to tell you the names of the major systems, what they are there for and vaguely how they are plumbed together.
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My go-to one looks like this. You can tell I’m not an architect.

APIs, ML, AWS, NLP. It can be like a foreign language for non-tech execs. The best thing to do is to use no jargon at all, but if you can’t avoid it provide a simple glossary and opportunities to learn. “Would you like me to give you a refresh on the key points of what an API is and why they’re a good thing?”​

We talked about this a while ago (see Agile Angst – Overcoming Governance Woes). If the executive you’re working with is going to be an agile project sponsor or steering committee member then some dedicated training is especially useful for everyone’s peace of mind.

​If your digital tools are for consumers, then help your non-tech executives sign up for them and show them how to use it. Yes, you may become the mobile app help desk for the leadership team but if they love it, they will become your greatest advocates in your organisation.

​A monthly one-pager, that shows your digital usage, customer feedback and rates of automation keeps everyone informed and ensures senior leaders can answer accurately if they are asked about digital stats from your board.

​Help your senior leaders understand the extent to which you are leading, on par or behind the market in terms of digital capabilities. (We talk about this in more detail in this post on understanding what customers want).

Invest in a short compelling video of how your customer experience may change with digitisation and then back this up with a one-pager, showing the key deliverables for each horizon.
 
One last point around frequency: actions one to four are one-offs with little reminders if needed. Actions five to seven go in a monthly or bi-monthly update to your senior leadership team or board.

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