Doggy Daycare and Digital Transformation for Better Services

This article first appeared on New York Business Journal. Republished with permission for your convenience.

How does Doggy Daycare relate to Digital Transformation for Better Services?

“Just last week, I registered my dog for daycare, using a fancy iPhone app to answer lots of questions about vet history, dog behavior, etc. When I showed up in person, they asked all the same questions again, on paper,” says Mike Idengren, founder of LSA Digital. “My time was wasted, and the user experience (UX) was terrible — and I’m not even confident they were securely handling the duplicate copies of my data.

“So, that’s a failure to change processes and adopt the technology, not a problem with the technology itself.”

Digital transformation has long been characterized by slow, cumbersome “big bang” projects that often fail to deliver long-term results. For many organizations, the traditional “people, process, and technology” approach has proven too fragmented, leaving businesses and government agencies grappling with too much wasted investment on technology — without bringing people and processes along for the ride. LSA Digital recognized this gap and developed a modern solution: an agility-infused digital formula that delivers lasting business and IT service value, instead of a “big bang” approach that can burn out after the “big project” is done.

“Organizations we’ve spoken to are tired of hearing the same technology- implementation heavy strategies. We provide something different — an agile digital transformation approach to deliver faster value and allow for frequent course-corrections,” says Idengren.

The problem with traditional approaches

The digital transformation market has long been dominated by large firms. While these companies have extensive reach and resources, they might employ an approach that delivers big technology implementations and miss the reason for the technology investment in the first place — to meet rapidly changing business needs and help organizations to help themselves over the long term. In fact, according to McKinsey, 70% of digital transformations are still failing to meet leadership’s goals.

Traditional digital transformation efforts are heavy, slow and transactional — frequently emphasizing lots of strategy and PowerPoint presentations that can be disconnected from sustainable execution. “I was personally in that hot seat as a director, working on large system integrations and process improvement,” Idengren said. “There wasn’t enough focus on culture and process change needed to help the client be successful after the transformation is done — most of the focus was on strategy and system implementation, then onto the next one…”

LSA’s solution: The Digital Formula

LSA Digital boasts its proven Digital Formula to bring together key components of digital transformation: agile culture, lean governance and processes, scalable technology investments, and secure user experience. Taken together, these components — considering full lifecycle costs — result in long-term sustainable business and IT services that are secure, reliable and effective.

Beyond The Digital Formula components — how the formula is applied is key to continued success after the consultants leave. For effective post-transformation benefits, the organization has to adopt a new “business as usual” (BAU). Agile culture change, process and technology adoption are crucial. Applying relevant agile principles helps consultants and employees work together on cross-functional teams to achieve this — learning and delivering outcomes at the same time.

Apply The Digital Formula: Starting small

LSA Digital applies proven execution techniques, using a “start-small and scale-up” approach — blending micro-learning and practical hands-on with more comprehensive training — to achieve greater, sustainable successes.

But teams cannot simply “take training” and expect to be successful.

For example, in a software development scenario, small cross-functional teams are asked to deliver software products faster, with higher quality. Frequently, they are told by leadership to “go be agile” and given access to Jira and a two-day class and then are expected to deliver the desired outcomes. Instead, a start-small approach uses a blend of classroom and micro-learning combined with hands-on tooling (e.g., Jira + confluence), helping teams work together to learn the basics of agility — and iteratively working together to deliver working software faster, with higher quality.

Apply The Digital Formula: Scaling up

“Take my dog daycare example and multiply it by 100 for large digital programs that are implementing complex systems and solutions for millions of customers,” Idengren said. “Traditionally, many consultants hit the ground, too often working in ‘silos’ to deliver their own parts of the transformation, expecting it all to ‘just come together’ at the end.”

Upgrading agile to agility-at-scale allows organizations to deliver and sustain large solutions with the same agile principles. This starts with an agility-infused and flexible Digital Operating Model (DOM), combined with Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise (SAFe) and other right-sized frameworks and methods. This approach paves the way for agility-at-scale to deliver large solutions (dog daycare x 100), allowing “teams-of-teams” to experiment, get fast feedback and deliver faster, higher quality outcomes.

In addition to better “digital transformation” outcomes, this scaled-up approach helps to improve agile culture and how solutions are designed across The Digital Formula, such as investing in leading software tools and training for business process modeling & analysis, enterprise architecture, and ServiceNow for IT Service Management.

“To digitally transform the organization, we need to digitally transform how business and IT work together to deliver better products and services — both during and after the digital transformation effort.”

For example, two of The Digital Formula elements are “Scalable Technology Investments” and “Full Lifecycle Costs.” To scale up digital transformation outcomes, technology portfolio management / application portfolio rationalization is necessary to “weed out” obsolete, inflexible or expensive applications and technology — helping to reduce “technical debt” and modernize applications (e.g., preferring integrated Software-as-a-Service or Platform-as-a-Service solutions). This helps reduce the full lifecycle cost of older “on-premise” applications that need more maintenance and have less flexibility (and possibly worse UX and non-compliant security postures).

Outcomes across industries

LSA Digital’s agility-driven approach has made a significant impact across various sectors — including commercial and government. For example, the company’s work in the U.S. Air Force Research Labs (AFRL) has improved R&D and engineering IT services, resulting in faster research, better decision-making and more efficient operations. “Our work with AFRL really highlights how agility-at-scale can drive meaningful change,” Idengren explains. “From a secure Google Cloud Platform (GCP) foundation to optimized processes, better UX and IT service management, we were able to help them leverage technology to reduce researcher toil and deliver on mission objectives faster.”

LSA Digital has several dozen case studies across various industries, domains and software tools, where it has leveraged The Digital Formula to reduce operational complexity, enhance compliance, optimize application and technology portfolios, and improve customer and employee experiences and security.  To hear more about how they have leveraged agility-at-scale to deliver outcomes with LSA Digital, hear the Podcast episode between Mike Idengren and Adam Mattis from Scaled Agile: A Service-Oriented Future

The Digital Formula to the rescue

Looking ahead, LSA Digital is focused on expanding its reach while maintaining its agile mindset with its Digital Formula. “We’re not trying to be the biggest player in the market,” says Idengren. “In fact,” Idengren continues, “we have a flexible value delivery model — just like big IT advisory firms, we have delivered digital value in the hot-seat as a prime contractor — but we can also deliver as a subcontractor, or in a QA/Rescue role to help existing contractors deliver more value.”

LSA Digital empowers organizations through resources and strategic tools. The website contains flagship content, such as a database of typical “problems” and “solutions,” The Digital Formula podcast and LSA Digital Bits (short videos that offer quick insights). They also offer various free online self-assessments, to deliver a quick diagnostic to benchmark your own current maturity in various facets of agility-at-scale (agility, process, UX, ITSM and more).