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Ever-Evolving Landscape of Digital Transformation
One of the things that's really difficult about working in technology is that not only is the technology changing all the time, but the business landscape and the business needs are changing all the time as well.
In the digital age, the true power lies not in sheer strength or size, but in the ability to continuously adapt and reinvent oneself in the face of constant change.
My own experience with digital transformation is that we talk about only acquiring skills, but overlook the fact that it is equally important we talk about attitudes, behaviours and culture that nurtues digital intelligence. This holistic approach is vital for thriving in the digital era, where business, operations and technology models are converged.
I have learnt that on one hand, if you have a business-centric mindset, I recommend a hands-on exploration of digital technologies. Engage with creators of digital solutions, observe, listen and experiment. On the other hand, if you are a techie, I suggest opening your horizon to start thinking and learning about product management or product marketing. Flexibility, agility and preparedness for the unexpected as these are key traits for anyone in this field.
There are so many digital technologies and the useful lifetime of the technologies are getting shorter and shorter. Hence, I learnt the best practice is that you cannot underestimate the importance of having a purpose of using a particular technology
This reminds me of a story back in 2018 when I was working at a side gig. We were hosting a lot of our own servers at that time and our search team wanted to start using big data to improve website search functions. The team started tinkering a little bit on the cloud to do this. They saw some success and then they tinkered a little bit more, and they saw some more success. They kept tinkering and tinkering until one day we got a bill at the end of the month for £100,000 in cloud computing expenses—a potential annual expense of £1.2 million. This led us to reevaluate to utilise the technology more effectively and more cheaply if we brought it in-house.
I learnt an important thing about the big data that once you start using big data, it turns out everyone wants to start using big data. What happened when we had all these users jump on is that the company reliability and availability suffered. So, our recommendations team would run these really expensive jobs and bring down our cluster and that would affect our business intelligence team's ability to get their reports in the morning.
The situation escalated when operational disruptions drew the CEO's attention, sent an email highlighting all the days of the past month that he did not get his reports. This was a wake-up call, prompting us to reassess our priorities. We focused on reliability and availability, which involved expanding our infrastructure and separating critical operations from experimental tasks.
This experience taught me THREE important things:
- Recognising and aligning with the company's core objectives.
- Clearly defining the sucess and its metrics.
- Showing flexiblity, agility and willingness to adopt dynamic KPIs as circumstances change.
Eventually in digital transformation, it’s not always the strongest that survive, but the ones who can adapt and evolve the quickest to constant change understanding the broader context of technology in business, and being agile enough to pivot strategies as needed.
