Resilient Executive: Which Key Digital Technology Enablers Should You Worry About for Future Strategy? — Part 2

In part 1 of this series, I wrote about key digital enablers centered around technology. We’re going to continue the discussion around key enablers that don’t have much at all to do with technology. Part 2 will be focused on people and will be key to enacting any kind of digital evolution across an enterprise or startup, more so than any kind of technology or new kind of Agile.

In the case of CBG, or Cooperative Benefits Group, enablers are important because they mean we’re more likely to build world-class, cloud-native healthcare services to provide meaningful, singular customer and member experiences. Our mindset is what propels us forward in achieving a challenging vision: to build and support myriad healthcare entities through acclaimed clinical, operational and digital expertise and solutions to accelerate proven outcomes.

We want enablers in place because they mean we’re more likely to build world-class cloud-native healthcare services, embrace DevSecOps, launch AIOps, enforce Infrastructure-as-Code, integrate Chaos Engineering to our testing practices, put automation everywhere (including self-healing), widely adopt serverless architectures everywhere, prioritize edge computing, continue to evolve microservices, and easily connect separate and siloed data sources to provide meaningful, singular member experiences.

Unified digital prioritization

Before any people enablers are tackled, you need to understanding your “why.” An Enterprise or startup needs to understand which digital priorities make the biggest difference and will help them on the trajectory they’ve hitched their vision on. Without executive leader alignment and prioritization, most enablers will do very little to help accelerate digital goals.

When I’ve seen digital evolution or transformation succeed, there have generally have been a few characteristics within the organization that helped facilitate that success. Unified digital prioritization at the senior leadership level was key. Here are some of the most important traits that need to be in place for this specific enabler.

• Aligned executive team with arbiter for priority tie-breakers. There will always be disagreements, but there needs to be an arbiter to navigate those difficult big picture decisions and make the priority tiebreakers. At CBG, we call this our proxy arbiter. At product-based companies, you may call this a product owner.
• Weekly coordination & frequent prioritization at the highest leadership levels. Prioritization doesn’t just happen once a quarter but rather on a weekly basis during fluid planning and collaboration meetings. It needs to be ongoing, communicated clearly to the teams doing the building and delivering, and focused around the working hitting delivery teams intake channels.
• Engaged in capacity & demand conversations, walk in team’s shoes. Senior leadership teams doing the prioritization need to understand the capacity and demand hitting the delivery teams. They can only do this by walking in their shoes, caring about the delivery teams, and driving with data generated by the delivery teams.
• Adopt leadership perspective of customers as investors in services. Too frequently I’ve seen leaders adopt the mindset of being customers or requesters. Instead, they should adopt the mindset of being an investor in digital priorities and delivery teams, give their time, energy, and attention to these services that will last far into the future.

Free your data

Once digital prioritization has been unified by senior leadership, it’s time to liberate your organization’s data. Liberating data means not only enabling access for every member of an organization or collective. It means giving them all the tools they need to both access and use the data.

It’s not enough to give someone access to a database or data lake. What I’ve found is that you also need to set up easy access, analysis tools, pipelines, and truly empower our teams to get to the data they need.

Once that access is in place, thorough training, mentoring, and co-authoring needs to occur between data engineers and the workforce. If that easy access is not in place, data is as good as locked.

To determine if your company’s data & technology is liberated, consider asking yourself or your leaders these questions:

• Have you freely given data, technology, and knowledge across the business?
• Have you ensured that data & technology is available to teams who need it, when they need it?
• Have you prioritized connecting siloed data with API integrations and automation so workforce teams have access?
• Does your IT team aggressively control and/or restrict access to technology and data?
• Does your company use technology for top line growth? Do they ditch technology that detracts from bottom line?

Based on these questions, you should have a pretty strong idea on whether your organization has truly liberated their data.

Arm your citizen developers

So what exactly is a citizen developer? Defined simply, citizen developers are business users with little to no development or coding experience that build applications for their teams with IT-sanctioned technology. They are not a shadow IT team running rogue in the company, but work very closely with IT teams to co-author business applications in order to reduce the demand on delivery teams.

The concept of end users building their own applications is not new, but organizations and leaders understanding the powerful impact citizen developers can have on an organization, with more powerful modern tools, IS new.

With overworked technology teams, and business teams bubbling over with powerful, differentiating ideas, there are significant needs on both the IT side and business side of the fence for citizen developers.

To build a culture and people framework that is conducive to citizen development, strive to get these key tenets in place for your business:

• Train and inspire citizen developers across the business. Training shouldn’t just happen once, but should be ongoing, collaborative, and ideally involves embedding citizen developers for a period directly on standing delivery teams for paired development sessions.
• Encourage non-IT innovation, then connect and lead. Some of the best idea innovations I’ve seen at CBG came from outside of IT. Ensure a culture of continuous improvement is in place to foster and encourage non-IT innovation.
• Establish guilds, groups, clans, universities, or other bodies to foster collaboration & innovation. Whatever your company calls them, make sure the learning environment exists to facilitate collaborative learning, group show & tells, and shared mentoring.
• Continue enabling and co-creating with citizen developers. Once citizen developers are in place, there shouldn’t be a disconnect going forward between them and IT. Ideation and creation should be an ongoing partnership of delivery.
• Embrace low/no-code solutions to allow non-IT developers to thrive. Carefully chosen low/no-code tools can greatly accelerate automation, workflow, and UI type solutions. Research the correct ones and embrace them in your organization. They don’t need to make anyone feel like their jobs are at risk by embracing them.

TL;DR

That wraps up Part 2 of “Which Key Digital Technology Enablers Should You Worry About for Future Strategy?” In Part 1, I laid out three key enablers focused on technology and in Part 2 I called out three more that are focused on people that need to be in place to accelerate your forward trajectory. Enablers are important because they mean we’re more likely to build world-class, cloud-native healthcare services to provide meaningful, singular customer and member experiences. Good luck getting this implemented in your startup, enterprise, or team.