The 7 Deadly Sins of Digital Transformation & Cloud

During my first rewatch of my favourite show for a few years, Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, I started thinking about how the seven deadly sins derail digital transformation initiatives.

Pride

Digital transformation is a journey that requires specialist expertise that a not-yet-digital business does not natively have. While you should be proud of your successes, don’t be so prideful as to dismiss the difficulty of transforming.

Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” You should apply this idea to your partner landscape. You should either look for new partners or change the way you engage with your existing partners. If the transformation isn’t rife with challenging conversations and painful change, it’s all smoke, mirrors, and no real change.

Transformation is a journey your business must go on; you cannot outsource it.

Sloth

Cloud done properly enables speed to market. Beware of your sloth-like bureaucracy, which saps momentum and the organisation's drive to experiment.

Transforming requires reimagining your operating model, governance, and value streams based on first principles in a cloud-centric world. Failing to do this will hamstring your delivery, prevent you from seeing the benefits of the cloud, and lock you into a fancy data centre with a monthly bill.

Transforming requires your organisation to become rooted in the new reality; in a speed-dominated market, you cannot afford to have anchors pulling you backwards.

Wrath

Being part of an organisational transformation is an emotional process. Uncertainty breeds fear, which can quickly lead to anger and wrath.

Many businesses attempt to transform top-down, and while executive sponsorship is critical, significant time needs to be spent with those at the proverbial coal face to see success. It’s not top-down or bottom-up; it’s both. Giving everyone an Udemy subscription and a budget for sitting cloud exams is insufficient to equip people for the new world. Instead, you must empower people to use the transformation as an opportunity to resolve past issues that have plagued them.

Those leading the transformation should follow the idea coach's ideals; it’s about helping people become the champions of the change they want to see, not about forcing conformity from on high.

Gluttony

Like all good strategies, the transformation strategy should include what we will and won’t do. Attempting a gluttony of simultaneous projects is a recipe for mediocrity and disappointment.

Rather than allowing the pilot teams to pick whichever compute paradigm they want, filtering for architectural similarities will enable you to focus on building narrow, deep capability over broad, shallow capability. For example, focusing on serverless and other higher-level services significantly lowers the organisation's operational burden, increasing the experimentation and product discovery rate.

Transformation isn’t about changing everything at once; it’s about constantly prioritising based on impact and being ruthless about commitments.

Lust

Kubernetes, blockchain and generative AI have been the most divisive technologies of the last decade. Engineers naturally lust after the latest and most remarkable technologies, but digital transformation is a business transformation, not just a technology transformation.

While enabling technology is at the core of a digital company, pursuing new technology is a derivative of the quest for delivering customer value, not an adjacent adventure. With speed to market being the critical market differentiator, teams should be looking to produce cheap but valuable prototypes before investing in infrastructure that will grow the hypothetical scales. Just because your product vision talks to a billion users doesn’t mean you should build a system that supports a billion users on day one.

Being transparent about the challenges you’re looking to solve and the outcomes you're chasing as a business will enable engineers to fall in love with the problem, not the solution. We technologists naturally optimise; without a business objective to pursue, we’ll focus on technology problems.

Greed

Many cloud journeys begin in response to a data centre bill coming due. This compelling moment sets up the cloud as a cost-saving exercise. Where greed to recoup budget is the raison d’etre.

As has been a central theme so far, digital transformation and the purpose of the cloud is about speed to market and business differentiation. Choosing a data centre exit as the compelling moment shapes the journey away from this ideal, which poisons the transformation before it has even started in earnest. Corporate financial modelling has historically been around return on investment and tangible impact. Yet, in modern times, 75% of a business's value is from intangibles, such as reputation and perception; hence, the market values technology businesses at many revenue multiples. Digital transformation is a break away from the fitness functions of the previous eras, whereas starting with a cost focus is building on the old foundations.

Beginning your cloud journey focused on efficiency kills the goose that laid the golden egg. Instead, you need to focus on how to make the most effective use of the cloud in the pursuit, discovery and delivery of customer value.

Envy

Often, enterprises bemoan the agility and innovation of “born in the cloud” companies. Their envy makes them focus externally rather than internally, which results in acquisitions that rarely deliver on their initial promise.

You cannot buy digital transformation; you must live it and, unfortunately, suffer it. To paraphrase Marty Cagan on transformation, we must change “how we build, how we solve problems, and how we decide what problems to solve.” Integrating companies at your target state without undertaking the requisite internal transformation effort is an expensive exercise in failure. Enterprises such as Capital One and Lego have shown that digital transformation is possible with the proper focus and leadership, yet, unfortunately, many more enterprises have tried to buy their way to transformation and have failed.

While looking externally to see what is possible is a powerful motivator, your transformation vision should centre on how you will change from the core outwards, not your edge inwards.

A Virtuous Transformation

Transformations are inherently messy and will not be without flavours of the seven sins. Yet, hopefully, this exploration of how they can derail the journey enables you to identify and correct them in a timely fashion and give your transformation a better chance of success.

Let me know where you've seen the seven deadly sins threaten your cloud and digital transformation journeys.