Digital Transformation isn't about technology - it's about power.

In conversations about digital transformation, we often obfuscate and dance around the real problem: that the outcomes being delivered by a team of people will be challenged by another team of people. The truth is that digital transformation isn't about technology, it's about these three things:

• Who stands to gain the most by changing the outcome delivery of a workflow?
• Who stands to lose the most by changing the outcome delivery of a workflow?
• Who are the decision-makers who are in a position to act, and who influences them?

I started pulling this thread because of the sheer number of great digital conversations this week across a variety of topics.  Shared Services announcements via the U.S. Government’s Performance Council.  Digital learning versus online learning. Innovation, and especially disruptive innovation, as a functional part of large organizations.

All fantastic conversations.  I originally thought I was going to do something simple about the process of digital transformation.  Instead, a different theme arose: power. In the context of all the conversations I’ve seen over the past week, it is particularly interesting how in each of those conversations, some common threads appear:

• Some defined status quo exists which is equal parts law or regulation and pro forma.  This is considered the nominal operating condition of the process, workflow, or activity.
• Some eagerness or excitement for a form incognito - a new shape of the process, by means of significant disruption, usually via some innovation.
• Some super or subset of technology or process which itself contains a number of attributes known only to a group of specialists who play gatekeeper between the leadership who proclaim guardianship over the status quo and the people who want to see a change.

When you position the discussion like this, we begin the recognize that the real underlying conversation about what is happening has to do with power, and who makes decisions.  Of course, power has been written about for centuries. How to obtain, use, and maintain that power is the topic of many conversations, almost inevitably leading to a diatribe or soliloquy on The Prince, or more recently (if 1998 is recent), Greene’s 48 Laws of Power.

Even more recent is the profound shifts in leadership discussion towards emotional intelligence, negotiation, and conceptual models of leadership.  Even in these discussions, we find a pattern of historical significance and preference in the status quo versus newer and emergent thinking.  It is particularly interesting to note that much of the thinking which has formed the basis for modern emergent leadership and theory is only two or three decades old at the moment.  Barely a blip on the proverbial radar of historical leadership, with notable outliers and exceptions along the way.

Who gains and who loses?

One of the classes I love to teach most is a basic introduction to cybersecurity.  It brings me joy probably because you get the widest variety of backgrounds, the most intersectional diversity in disciplines, and the largest span of time in career.  It is a chance to challenge students to think in their own terms, to apply true critical thinking and proofing in order to ascertain, in a world of information saturation, which model of their own thinking and devising has the best chance of being accurate.

During this discussion, as we are talking about the evolution of law in the United States over the past thirty years, you can see the dawning realization that the formal social contract of the country is not keeping pace, and perhaps cannot keep pace with the rate of change.

“Why do you think that is?” I always ask.

And the answer, every time, always comes down to “People.”  Sometimes it is “People don’t like to change,” or sometimes it is specific to a subset of people, “Our congressional representatives don’t understand the problems”.  But always it comes down to people.

Not technology.  Not process. And it is important to highlight this part.  Often it isn’t merely an identification that these two other pieces of the societal triumvirate are moving too fast.  But instead, people are moving too slow.

This is an easy accusation to make because it’s relative to personal want and desire.  In the context of cybersecurity, it is incredibly simplistic because “safety” is a basic need for many.  Aligning those priorities often overrides other concerns.

But what outcome is in favor of the people?  And who decides what is favorable and what isn’t?  This sort of question scales at all levels. In any size organization, wherever there are people working together to achieve something, the question of who and how the determination is made on what constitutes an outcome, and what are the standards by which we judge successful (and unsuccessful) outcomes is always present.

Knowledge may be key to keeping the balance of power

Washington Monthly recently wrote an excellent piece about how technology literacy in the U.S. Federal Congress is nearly non-existent.  This is equal parts the fault of Congress by disbanding its own group of technology advisors and the lack of its constituents for not demanding more from leaders.  This is a common and easy position to take, except that as noted above it is precisely the intended result of the system as described - the nominal operating condition.  

Although the federal government is a convenient target to make an example, the same can be said of nearly all large organizations and any number of small/medium companies and even teams.  The question is: if two parts, technology and process, are out of sync with the third, people, what does the correction look like? The answer might be in the words we use and how we use them.

The Oxford English dictionary says that the very definition of transformation is “a marked change in form, nature, or appearance.”  It’s important to understand that the people who talk about transformation do so with an intent to change the way outcomes are created.  To do that, when process and technology are the two easiest pieces of the paradigm to advance the only one remaining is people. And as we are learning, changing people goes beyond any mere conceptual model of engineering, any disruptive technology innovation, and exceeds the impact of any single process.  

This directly challenges the status quo; sometimes obliquely, sometimes by promising a Unicorn and delivering a horse.  When considering the challenges of any new way of generating an outcome, assessing the internalized response and understanding whether you are indeed part of the normalized operation, a member of contention, or a gatekeeper is a useful insight.

People and Outcomes - the only things that matter

There’s a lot of work in the field of data science around the concept of entity resolution: specifically around how to confirm that multiple digital echoes are indeed the same physical entity.  Often this is linked to a person, but it could be just as easily an asset, a resource, anything which has a duality in both the physical and digital realms.

But beyond that, how much is being done in recognizing the discrete importance of an entity, especially in decision-making?  The resurgence in the popular appeal of systems thinking visualizes complex relationships, but it requires personal context. And yet, it is the concept of decision-making, authority, and responsibility which govern the interaction of the society.  

Although it may sound overly simple, any change requires two things:

• A critical mass of individuals who have a desire to move from the status quo
• The necessary leadership to accept responsibility and decision-making to change the status quo

So the next time you are sitting in an office talking about something new, digital, and different, ask those three questions about who gains, who loses, and what is changing. It's the best way to assess if your organization is ready for a real transformation, is just fine with where things are today, or might face a difficult journey ahead as the landscape changes unpredictably.