The Evolution of Digital Transformation: From Automation to CX First
By Debdulal Bagchi, Deputy Director – Digital Services, Department of Analytics, Performance and Innovation, City of Syracuse
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, federal, state, and local governments need profound transformations to stay relevant to their residents. At the heart of this evolution lies the journey towards automation, the adoption of a product approach to projects, and the pivotal role of change management in driving successful transitions. Let’s delve deeper into each of these elements and explore how they intersect to catalyze digital transformation initiatives.
1. Automation: Where the Journey Begins
Automation is the cornerstone of digital transformation, enabling organizations to streamline processes, increase efficiency, and drive innovation. From mundane, repetitive tasks to complex business workflows, automation technologies empower enterprises to automate manual processes and leverage data-driven insights to make informed decisions.
Our current list of projects across the city started with reviewing processes across departments, understanding the current state, future state, intermediate state, and gaps in between. To an extent, automation handled routine tasks such as data entry, document processing, and customer support inquiries, which helped us free up valuable human resources to focus on more time sensitive strategic initiatives. Such change has not only accelerated how we work but also reduced errors, focusing on enhancing scalability, to improve overall operational agility.
2. Product Approach to Projects: Shifting Paradigms
Traditionally, government organizations have approached projects linearly, project-centric, focusing on delivering predefined outcomes within fixed timelines and budgets. However, the product approach represents a paradigm shift towards a more iterative, customer-centric model of project management. Rather than treating projects as one-time endeavors, organizations adopt a product mindset, viewing products and services as continuously evolving entities that adapt to changing customer needs and market dynamics.
When the Digital Services arm was created for the city, I brought product approach concepts to cross-functional teams, recruiting team members with diverse skill sets who were ready to work collaboratively towards common goals. Apart from developing internal teams, our main role was to train and employ agile methodologies to iteratively develop projects and deliver value to internal and external customers in small increments. Through frequent feedback loops and continuous iteration, we were able to quickly respond to change requests, validate assumptions, and prioritize items of delivery.
The product approach fostered a culture of experimentation, innovation, and continuous improvement, allowing us to think proactively and deliver products and services that resonate with residents and internal stakeholders.
You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.
–Steve Jobs
3. Change Management’s Crucial Role: Navigating the Human Element
In my recent experience, the human element was paramount amidst the digital transformation and process optimizations for procurement overhaul, Office365 implementation, Kronos Payroll modernization, and CRM implementations. Change management played a crucial role in guiding through the complexities of such transformational enterprise changes; we ensured that employees, stakeholders, and organizational culture were aligned with the evolving digital strategy.
However, traditional project-based change management approaches have mostly failed to foster sustainable transformation. To truly thrive in an ever-evolving environment, we must embrace a paradigm shift towards continuous systemic organizational improvements.
Necessity for the Shift:
Unlike project-based change management, which focuses on discrete initiatives with defined start and end dates, systemic organizational continuous improvements would entail an ongoing process of incremental enhancements across all facets of the organization. This approach would recognize that change is not a one-time event but rather a continuous journey toward excellence.
We have tried to include such principles to bring in continuous improvement thinking across the enterprise:
1. Culture of Innovation: Fostering a culture that encourages innovation, experimentation, and learning from failures. Encourage employees at all levels to contribute ideas and solutions for improvement.
2. Data-Driven Decision Making: This is at the forefront of our thinking. We utilize data and metrics to identify areas for celebration, concern, and improvement and measure the impact of changes. We have established feedback mechanisms to gather insights from stakeholders and incorporate them into decision-making processes.
3. Cross-Functional Collaboration: It is not easy to do for government bodies, but it is an absolute necessity to break down silos and promote collaboration across departments and teams. It encourages problem-solving and decision-making.
4. Iterative Approach: Learning from our previous implementations, we are moving towards an iterative approach to change, where small, incremental changes are made continuously over time. We celebrate successes along the way and use momentary setbacks as opportunities for learning and refinement.
What, in my opinion, are the key benefits:
1. By embedding such a culture of continuous improvement, we can adapt more quickly to changing circumstances and emerging challenges as we mature as an organization.
2. Such culture will lead to streamlined processes, reduced waste, and increased impact, ultimately enhancing the value we provide to residents.
3. All this cannot be done without empowering employees; such empowerment fosters a sense of ownership and pride in the work, leading to higher morale and retention rates.
4. Such cultural improvement will also enhance public trust and satisfaction.
Challenges and Considerations:
Implementing such systemic organizational continuous improvements takes time, and for us, it has been a slow shift in mindset and resistance from various teams and organizational cultures. As leaders, we are trying to prioritize change management efforts, provide adequate resources and support, and lead by example to overcome these challenges effectively. The path is not simple and straightforward but is a constant push-and-pull initiative.
Our target at the end of the day is to better serve the needs of the constituents and communities.
So, what does the future look like?
With the ever-growing maturity levels of our teams and workforce, we are moving towards a collaborative approach to problem solving, keeping in mind the human centered approach and thinking about customer experience first
Creation of Digital Playbook in the Future:
Objective: The objective of creating such a digital playbook would be to provide a comprehensive guide that outlines the principles, and best practices with examples for executing digital transformation initiatives within the organization.
What fuels the Digital Playbook? –
Customer Experience (CX) Practice:
Objective: The objective of the CX Practice would be to understand and envision a roadmap of the end-to-end customer experience across digital touchpoints, proactively advising to drive engagement, satisfaction, and continued trust .
Key Components of a future CX Practice:
a. Customer Journey Mapping: Conducting customer journey mapping exercises to understand the end-to-end customer experience and identify pain points, gaps, and opportunities for improvement. Map out customer interactions across digital touchpoints to gain insights into their needs, preferences, and behaviors.
b. Persona Development: Creating customer personas based on demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data to represent different segments of the target audience. Developing detailed profiles that capture the goals, challenges, and preferences of each persona to inform CX strategy and design.
c. Omni-channel Strategy: Developing an omni-channel strategy that provides a seamless and consistent experience across digital channels, including websites, apps, social media, and email. Ensuring that customers can transition seamlessly between channels and devices without friction or disruption.
d. User Experience (UX) Design: Prioritizing user-centric design principles to create intuitive, accessible, and engaging digital experiences. Conduct usability testing, prototype validation, and iterative design iterations to optimize the usability and effectiveness of digital interfaces.
e. Personalization and Customization: Implementing personalization and customization to digital experience to meet customer preferences and behaviors. Leverage data-driven insights, analytics, and machine learning algorithms to deliver better content, guidance , and services to the residents.
f. Feedback and Measurement: Establish mechanisms for collecting business, stakeholders, and customer feedback, sentiment analysis, and performance metrics to gauge the effectiveness of CX initiatives, monitor satisfaction, track progress, and identify areas for improvement.
g. Continuous Optimization: Iterating based on feedback and data insights to continuously improve the digital experience. Implement audits, testing, and optimization techniques to refine content, features, and functionality over time.