Creates a smooth flow from business strategy to execution, while being better prepared to capitalize on opportunities or defend against competitive threats that arise along the way. When the data says 'move', you can. Realize business efficiency through being more focused on high value activities and greater investment return through scaling investment only in what you know will have the desired business impact.

Align everything to maximising value delivery by leveraging advanced technology strategies, evolutionary organizational ecology and adaptive leadership styles.

Frictionless Operating Model

There is genuine intent of alignment and good working relationship between Business and Tech. Tooling, meetings and cadence support collaboration and information exchange and help determine priority. A customer lens is being applied, forming new customer value measures and a conscious understanding of the variation in run the business from grow the business. Tech strategy takes cues from business strategy.

Focusing

The business and tech have a shared sense of budgets and common backlogs, co-creation and common planning with clear organization wide prioritization. Tech strategy closely supports business strategy and is invested in as a strategic asset. Projects and programs are funded incrementally and teams formed cross functionally. Enterprise policies and processes adapt to be more guardrails than sign offs, team over individual, incremental rather than annual.

Executing

The borders between tech and the business become very blurred, the technology strategy is co-created and aligned to business outcomes. The organization design is built on product thinking with skills combined to deliver outcomes in stable teams. Capacity and outcomes are the basis of funding, funding is incremental. Customer value is the prime measure for decision making and all work is aligned to moving this measure. Teams have autonomy to make decisions to optimize the achievement of the outcome, visual systems and alignment reducing the need for heavy governance and approvals.

Optimizing

Adaptive leadership skills are the mainstay of the culture. Value is delivered frequently and the portfolio is managed through this lens. Technology deeply informs the business strategy and is the catalyst for differentiation. The technology strategy is holistic and encompases the whole enterprise. Enterprise policies and processes adapt to autonomous, empowered communities who share performance measures and self organize. 'Beyond Budgeting' style continuous financial flows ensure high value work receives funding as needed.

Strengthening

With Platforms you are able to promote re-use of core assets, adopt emerging technology more readily and make technology updates and changes with minimal impact to other parts of the business. Technology operates strategically to support business outcomes.

Ensure your architecture is better prepared to move when your business strategy says you need to. Achieved by exposing core business capabilities easily as consumable services, providing self-service access to data, evolutionary architecture patterns and advanced delivery infrastructure.

Platform Strategy

IT has begun to take a holistic planning approach to technology, with a coherent roadmap across all systems that takes into account current state and likely future business needs. For the most urgent needs, legacy modernization has begun for key systems. Development and operations cooperate more often than they conflict, each with better sympathy for the other.

Technology roadmapping has led to the beginnings of "platform thinking" with a burgeoning technical infrastructure that, while maybe not self-serve, does provide elasticity. Legacy applications have been stabilized via remediation and are in good condition to be augmented, continued or replaced. Many applications have begun to expose reusable functionality via APIs. Deployment is automated rather than manual. Development and Operations have begun to collaborate by building DevOps culture into the organization.

"Platform thinking" has led to complete self-serve capabilities so that teams can put products into production and support them in a true "you build it, you run it" style. The infrastructure platform itself is considered a product, with a dedicated team. Individual APIs have evolved into a coherent business API ecosystem, exposing reusable capabilities that can be remixed to create new business value. New systems are cloud native, any remaining legacy systems have been hardened and industrialized behind APIs.

IT leverages Evolutionary Architecture to create systems that work for today's needs while being adaptable to future changes. The organization understands Conway's Law -- that IT systems mirror the structures of the teams that build them -- and actively reorganizes teams to create fluid, modern architectures. The internal API ecosystem is exploited extensively to create new value for customers. The organization is well positioned to create platform businesses -- where a business is itself a platform -- if this fits within the business strategy.

Small, cross-functional teams create simple, intuitive user experiences by putting customer & employee experience as a top priority. The organization uses smaller increments and investment decisions to identify the biggest opportunities for success before making longer term commitments. This increases the return on investments and promotes innovation in delivering value for customers.

A design-led and data-driven approach to building modern digital products and experiences iteratively through experimentation.

Experience Design & Product Capability

Customer interactions are considered 'important', customer insights are used to drive value based prioritization and hypothesis testing leveraged to validate insights. As such product value is delivered incrementally and continuously through a formalized software development lifecycle (SDLC). Product design is more open and collaborative (e.g. story mapping) and technology is used as a way to increase customer experience.

Business outcomes are well defined and reflective of customer value, customer experience is a first-class concern. These business outcomes are broadly understood across the organization allowing product work to be more aligned to achieving them rather than outputs (or at a minimum consciously not aligned). Techniques such as Design Thinking and Test and Learn experimentation are used to problem solve and synthesize, creating a better understanding of customer value and informing feature, process and usability decisions. Teams are cross-functionally organized around a loose definition product and are doing continuous design and delivery. Product decisions are driven with a business lens and a semi formal organizational construct forms around managing trade-offs.

Customer experience is smart, intuitive, seamless and connected. Customer learning influences the business strategy, understanding value in terms of the customer and strategizing how to maximise that. Product management is mature with repeatable product development practices, autonomous team and blurred boundaries of 'product' constructs, more influenced by customer outcomes as an organizing mechanism. New digital business models and products emerge involving multiple coherent customer touchpoint interactions and qualitative user feedback.

A deeper understanding of human behavior is used to build something exceptional. The organization is design-led and data-informed with the ability to evolve interactions with customers across contexts. Uncertainty and the speed of change is embraced, fast, cheap experiments and short customer feedback cycles inform an adaptive business strategy. Product Managers own from product vision to go to market strategy, roadmap delivery, product marketing and operations to achieve outcome success. Technology innovation is creating new revenue opportunities, products or features can be entered and exited from the market at pace to meet heightened customer expectations for personalized and consistent interactions.

Advanced examples include everything from granularly secured access to raw data to advanced machine learning models assisting in decision making in the boardroom. Creates new insights to unlock new sources of value, new products and better decision making in near real time.

An organizational appreciation and infrastructure for leveraging all data assets. This includes simple, secure, and efficient capture, storage, processing, and self-service exposure of the organization’s data.

Intelligence-Driven Decision Making

Data is largely viewed as information, the organization seeks actionable knowledge and opportunity from raw data. Data is still siloed and stored as complete 'raw' data on file systems or cloud buckets but more accessible, e.g. through granular batches and Change Data Capture (CDC)-to-stream capturing the state of data across time. Insights are gathered through basic reporting techniques.

There is an increased capability in taking and using data from information to insights, helping to increase understanding, predicting and detecting. A degree of statistical literacy creates the ability to reason with the data and start to understand and identify causal evidence. The data is generally unified, based around tasks and access patterns, and available between systems via APIs. It is stored in basic data lakes owned by IT, with little or no data governance. Isolated, non-integrated usage of Machine Learning and advanced analytics is emerging.

Data is a critical force in decision making, insights are actively deployed and made available for consumption. Examples include hypothesis testing, planning and prioritization. Enterprise-wide data governance guides handling and management of data sets to support security, business operations, accuracy, compliance and business goal attainment. More adaptive data architectures are used, allowing easy ingestion, inexpensive scaling and for data to be treated more like a product ie. it is discoverable and consumable regardless of where it resides and is in a self-service mode across the organization. Data-scientists are being used to explore potential insights and connect in with a broader, enterprise-wide, use of Machine Learning and analytics to create immediate value.

The emergence of an intelligent enterprise where insight adoption creates action and has immediate impact such as product creation or other value to employees and customers. A data culture across the organization amplifies the use of best appropriate techniques, including advanced analytics and Machine Learning, to identify revolutionary change and opportunity while managing risk. Advanced technology practices and continuous Intelligence removes friction between data and business value, insight-driven feedback loops iterate the business strategy.

A modern approach to software development leverages patterns and best practices of lean, iterative, and continuous delivery of software. This creates an architecture capable of dealing with smaller workloads and more frequent change, the cornerstone of digital businesses.

The best business strategies in the world are meaningless without the ability to execute them. Technology driven organizations understand how to make that happen utilizing modern software development practices.

Engineering Culture, Delivery Mindset

Teams have adopted Agile fundamentals, providing noticeable benefits to transparency and teamwork much like in the Agile Fluency Model. Often teams use Kanban or other work-in-progress limits. Customers can redirect teams regularly to work on the most valuable outcomes. Teams practice Continuous Integration and have some automated testing in place.

Teams have grown their skills and are sustainably delivering with Agile. Business outcomes are well understood and the work is aligned to achieving those outcomes, rather than delivering features or other work units. Teams include cross-functional skills, for example design, and have low defects and high productivity. Customer experience is a first-class concern. Teams have begun to enable "test and learn" cycles by deploying small, cheap experiments to production to test intuitions and get market feedback quicker.

Technology teams are well integrated with the business, achieving both rapid innovation and business agility. They make proactive technology choices with a clear view of tech choices across the organization. Developer experience is a first-class concern, ensuring motivated productive devs. Teams have high confidence in their automated test suites, bake quality in from the start, and are not afraid to operate their software or carry a pager. "Technologist" is a respected career path and the wider organization has begun recruitment campaigns to bring tech expertise back in-house.

IT embraces a "responsible experimentation" culture, using test-and-learn across the entire organization. The best technology choices, patterns and methods naturally emerge and are adopted across the organization. Innovation thrives, and the best discoveries are leveraged by many teams. Architecture supports continual change and fast reactions to new business conditions. The organization has a mature ability to make technical choices encompassing new cutting-edge technologies. As a result you can think in much shorter increments, cycles are small, decisions are quick and units of work smaller.

The Digital Fluency Model will help you map out your aspired level of fluency for each building block capability and identify the sensible-default set of investments required to achieve your business goals. Select a building block to get started.

Building blocks of Digital Fluency

The Digital Fluency Model

To embed the characteristics of a modern digital business into your organization, you need to build capabilities in the elements that are critical to digital evolution. We refer to these as the building blocks of a modern digital business and we believe that investing in these capabilities has the greatest impact on creating sustainable change within your organization.

Transparency and collaboration lead to better, more cross functional, decision making. Resources are more focused in on the work that delivers higher value.

Agree, plan and set up your change:

Measurable improvement including: product/service cycle times, increased capability to deploy more digital services (e.g. IOT) , the ability to make change and capturing of more frequent data points lead to a more adaptive business model.

Mastery of practices:

Speed of value delivery and ease of technology adoption lead to higher returns and the emergence of new business value streams.

Remove constraints:

Innovation and product excellence lead to market shaping, unique revenue models. Responsiveness across all aspects of the organization as a core capability, creating intimate customer interactions.

Reinforce across the business:

Digital Fluency is about achieving what is required for your specific needs and goals and recognizing the importance of continually investing and evolving with your business and customers.

Fluency will be different for each capability, for each organization and even across different parts of the same organization.

The path to fluency starts with an awareness that something needs to change in order to be successful

The Path to Digital Fluency

Discover your Digital Fluency

The building blocks of a modern digital business

Digital Fluency is about achieving what is required for your specific organizational goals and recognizing the importance of continually investing and evolving with your business.

Fluency is aspirational and the desired levels of fluency will be different for each capability, for each organization and even across different parts of the same organization. Your unique Digital Fluency Pattern allows you to identify the sensible-default set of investments required to achieve your business goals.

Your Digital Fluency Pattern

To discuss your digital fluency aspirations, please get in touch

Digital Fluency is aspirational and the desired levels of fluency will be different for each capability, for each organization and even across different parts of the same organization. Your unique Digital Fluency Pattern allows you to identify the sensible default set of investments required to achieve your business goals.