As digital stops being an ambition and becomes simply a background assumption for how businesses are expected to operate, we may eventually reach a point where talking about the market for digital transformation, as distinct from the wider market for consulting services, feels like an anachronism. For the time being, however, clients (with the exception, perhaps, of the true digital natives) still frame their business ambitions in the language of digital transformation.
But this does not mean that consultants can afford to stand still in their understanding of digital either. The longevity of the concept of digital transformation is, in large part, a product of its capacity for evolution; the digital priorities of clients today look very different from those of ten, five, or even two years ago. We spoke with Chan Suh, Senior Partner and Chief Digital Officer at consulting firm Prophet, in order to better understand just how those priorities have shifted over time.
To start with the basics: What does the term ‘digital’ mean to you, personally?
Digital, in my view, isn't about humans or technology; it's about the amalgamation of the two. It's about how you marry human behaviours with technological advancements. I think that those of us working in digital transformation need to start paying as much attention to what happens 'with' the technology as 'in' the technology. Given where we are on the adoption curve right now, it's no longer possible to use technology itself as a differentiator; instead, the focus must shift to what you do with that technology.
I'm of the view that the last 25 years of digital transformation should be seen as investment years. Industry, globally, was trying to figure out how to fully take advantage of the opportunities created by this new world. The result was a lot of failures—overwhelmingly more failures than successes, in fact, interspersed with just a few spectacular successes. But all of those failures represented an investment in human and institutional knowledge about what works and what doesn't work. Now, we're moving into a period of harvesting, as businesses and individual consumers start to reap the benefits of the technologies we've invented and everything we, as a society, have learned about how to use them.
How does COVID fit into that historical view of digital transformation? In what way has the pandemic changed the parameters of the question, so to speak?
The pandemic has demonstrated just how much can be achieved with the technology that we already have access to. Prior to 2020, most businesses assumed that they'd never get to a place where 90% of their employees were able to work from home without huge investment into better equipment, new software, cultural change, and so on. But it turned out that people were able to adapt organically at a much faster pace than anticipated. No-one had to go out and say, ‘There's a new COVID version of digital, and a whole new set of products you have to buy.’ Instead, people were able to bend existing technology to their needs. In some ways, it was a triumph of human ingenuity and adaptability over tech vendors; I think it helped a lot of organisations to realise that digital transformation doesn't have to start with buying a hugely expensive new piece of tech.
COVID has certainly shone a light on the important enabling role played by technology infrastructure. Companies that had already migrated to the cloud or were in the process of doing so, for example, found themselves in a much better position to make the changes forced on them by the pandemic. While I don't think that infrastructure is as important as human adaptability, it is a critical piece of the digitisation puzzle; having a robust and flexible infrastructure to work with can help accelerate the cultural and behavioural shifts that need to take place.
In the post-COVID world, speed and adaptability have become much more important for our clients, particularly when it comes to digital transformation. We now have a very different understanding of the workforce than we used to; we know that people can adapt very quickly when they need to. And because of that, the focus has shifted away from long-term technology roadmaps, and towards trying to create impact with the best of what we already have access to. There's very much an attitude of 'good enough is good enough'; clients want to get value out of the stuff they've already built or can rent, rather than spend all their time and money worrying about what internal tech debt they'll be paying off in five years.
And what role, in your view, can consulting firms play in facilitating the digital transformation of their clients?
There's so much technology out there, across so many different categories—CRM, ERP, cybersecurity, etc.—that nobody in their right mind would be able to entertain a general survey of the tech landscape, even within a single category. So, consulting firms have an extremely important role to play in helping clients understand the vendors to buy from and the packages to select. However, I think that in the past, technology consultants have sometimes been guilty of letting the tail wag the dog. We shouldn't start with the technology itself; we need to start with an understanding of what business results our clients need to generate and let that inform the tech road we go down. Technology can power digital transformation, but it shouldn't be confused with the transformation itself.
Transformation work must be results-driven. Sometimes, you'll have consultants come into an organisation and spend their time measuring everything and reporting to the client on all the ways their digital maturity has progressed. But who really cares about that as a goal? If a transformation has been truly effective, then you shouldn't need to be told that things are transformed; you should be able to see it for yourself in the impact on results and business outcomes.
What type of skills do consultants need to have in order to create value for their clients in the digital transformation space?
As consultants, if we want to help our clients digitally transform their organisations, then we need to be able to quickly help them diagnose their businesses and identify where they should be focusing their efforts—what needs to be accelerated, what needs mitigation, and so on. That's often thought of as a technology analysis skillset, but I think it requires a combined approach. You can't just analyse the technology in isolation; you need to analyse the technology and the people who are supposed to use that technology. This means the processes and methodologies used in a firm and how the firm’s structure enables the transformation. And of course, our passion at Prophet is not merely to observe and optimise but to also innovate and evolve.
To deliver high-quality digital transformation work for clients, a consulting firm needs access to a wide variety of different skillsets and different kinds of consultants. But what's more important—and where I think a lot of firms slip up—is the synthesis part. It's not enough to have a native understanding of all these different topics—technology, business model, customer experience, organisation design, and so on in siloes. You need to get those different elements to work together in the right rhythm to achieve a growth goal. Multi-disciplinary is not enough. We need interdisciplinary.
How has client demand for digital services influenced the evolution of Prophet over the past few years?
The consulting market is in a sprint right now as every firm looks to develop and enhance their digital capabilities. Some of them are doing it intentionally; others are falling into it because they have to, in order to survive. A lot of firms have taken a 'portfolio' approach, trying to make sure they have as many different tools in their toolkit as possible. At Prophet, we've gone in a slightly different direction. Instead of an additive approach, we've used an integrative approach. Our focus has been on in-house synthesis; we're trying to get non-techies to understand technology, lead gen people to understand org design, and so on. Obviously, you're never going to be able to get someone to understand a topic to the extent of someone who's spent their whole career in that area. But if you can get them to understand the hook-ups and the points of interaction with their own area of expertise, then you can put them in a position to deliver better solutions that seamlessly go from strategy to execution, with speed and grace.
We've taken an ecosystem-focused approach to developing our digital capabilities here at Prophet. We're not trying to pretend to be all things to all people. Instead, we've developed a strong central hub of growth-minded expertise—surrounded by an exoskeleton of specialist knowledge and executional capabilities. Some of those capabilities are in-house, others have been secured through contracted partnerships. That exoskeleton is vital for enabling us to deliver effective digital transformation work for our clients; and the central hub allows us to coordinate the different elements of the ecosystem and point them in the direction of growth.
Firms like ours can't rely on continually selling the same services to our clients. We're not trying to create a situation where clients are dependent on us to be long term staff augmentation. Maybe the first few times a client needs something, you do it for them; but there needs to be a focus on co-creating and upskilling them, so that in the future they're capable of doing it themselves. Our focus needs to be on climbing the staircase, on constantly coming back to our clients with new approaches and new value propositions. I see it as a cycle: We must constantly challenge ourselves and build up our own knowledge of digital business transformation, and then convey that knowledge and help our clients to implant it in their own organisations while we move on to new, more innovative areas.
You mentioned innovation there—and that’s a term that often comes up in conversations about digital transformation. Could you elaborate a bit on the link between those two concepts, and the way that innovation can help drive transformation?
Innovation is one of those infinitely flexible concepts, and one that can be applied at many different levels. When an individual employee converts their home office into a video centre, that's innovation; but so is building a new business model for a Fortune 500 company. These days, innovation is embedded into 90% or more of the work that we do as a consulting firm—because so much of our work revolves around helping clients understand their place in a new world and a new technology landscape. But the real challenge, in my view, isn't innovation itself. Rather, it's about making sure that innovation is fully embedded into the DNA of everyone in the client organisation—and that will ensure that the innovation going on within their business will drive real impact.
For most of this interview, we’ve focused on clients’ digital priorities as they currently stand; but how do you see those priorities evolving and changing over the next two to three years?
Over the next few years, clients are still going to be buying digital transformation work from consulting firms. But I hope and expect that they will become much more discriminating, and much more wary about getting locked into a single vendor. As an industry, we need to eradicate the notion that one vendor can control an entire transformation. At Prophet, we tell all our clients that it doesn't matter how big or how smart you are, you're going to need to bring many different parties to the table if you want to effectively transform your organisation.
One of the big trends we're likely to see over the next few years will be clients pushing for a shrinking of the time between decisions being made in the board room and those decisions turning into outcomes at the ground-level. Clients are under pressure on so many different fronts—pressure to secure their supply chains, pressure to innovate, pressure to be more socially and environmentally responsible, and so on. They don't have time anymore to wait two years before a project starts generating value for them. In many cases, that's leading to a desire from clients to incorporate more technology and digital skills into their own organisations. They don't want to be forever reliant on external support from consultants; they don't want to have to surgically implant digital capabilities into their businesses whenever they need them. Eventually, we may get to a point where some degree of digital know-how is integral to every organisation's business portfolio. We're not there yet, but we are moving in that direction.
I think in the future, we'll start to move away from the idea of digital transformation as a singular event—which implies that an organisation has either transformed or it hasn't. Instead, I think people will start to see transformation as a constant. The digital landscape is always changing—so businesses can't afford to take their feet off the accelerator. Digital transformation needs to be understood as an ongoing process of evolution, adaptation, and innovation. Aristotle said that we need to treat excellence not as an act, but a habit—and I think the same is very much true of digital transformation.
