Is Your Firm's IT Organization Ready For Digital Transformation?

Why Read This?

Learn how to find out if your IT organization is ready to undertake a significant effort such as Digital Transformation. This blog assumes a general understanding of Chordia Consulting’s RAITH™ service.

Using RAITH™ to Target Focused Improvement Opportunities

This blog will focus on using RAITH™, Chordia Consulting’s remotely available IT healthcheck service to target focused improvement opportunities. The concept is simple: a client answers a set of questions specific to a targeted interest area such as Digital Transformation and those answers are analyzed to create a heatmap that locates and graphically presents the core problem areas. This heatmap of the client’s current state problem areas is then compared with a “desired state” heatmap for the target in question. Various desired states or “Points of View” (PoV) have been created by Chordia Consulting based on research and experience working with a variety of clients (see related blog about Points of View here). Those components where there is a difference between the hotspots (the “current state”) and the required capabilities (the “future state”) are highlighted along with a list of suggested initiatives or actions to close the current / future gap.

What Must IT Be Good At?

Using this heatmap approach, we can ask “What must IT be good at to support a Digital Transformation initiative?” Such a map looks like the one on the right. Components associated with understanding the IT customer and the overall business, architecture, application development, security and data are all highlighted as important (darker colors) to supporting Digital Transformation, as you might expect.

If we now overlay this “Point of View” map for Digital Transformation with one that represents a client’s overall IT situation based on answers to RAITH’s standard 30 symptoms (or questions), we can, without any more effort, get a picture of the most relevant problem areas for our Digitally Transforming client.

Over 450 Detailed Symptoms

RAITH actually has well over 450 detailed symptoms which are embedded within the 30 standard ones. By taking a subset of these detailed symptoms, those specific to a particular interest area (e.g. Digital Transformation), we are able to create a more nuanced view of the client’s current situation. For example, Chordia currently has identified 190 detailed symptoms that relate to Digital Transformation. By responding to those more detailed symptoms, the client now can create a very detailed description of their current IT capabilities specifically relating to Digital Transformation.

Answering More Questions for More Precise Analysis

Now let’s look at our same sample client who wants to be prepared for Digital Transformation. Instead of answering just 30 questions, the client answers all 190 detailed symptom questions to yield a highly targeted heatmap of problem hotspots such as the one to the right. According to this heatmap, our sample client has identified a need for improvement in understanding the business and working better with the IT customer (column 1).

Using the same Point of View for Digital Transformation I described above, we can now significantly refine our analysis of what the improvement priorities should be. Because our sample client isn’t good at working with and understanding the IT customer, and because it’s essential to be skilled in those areas for a successful Digital Transformation effort, our heatmap hotspots highlight those components primarily in the first column which need significant improvement.

This same technique can be used to identify readiness for many different types of projects. Chordia continues to develop new Points of View and targeted symptom lists to help our clients conduct this kind of analysis.

Please contact Chordia Consulting to learn how this technique can benefit you.