Never Waste a Crisis: Digital Transformation amid Financial Turbulence
By Andrew Millar, Head of Web Services, University of Dundee
“Never waste a crisis!”. That’s been my clarion call to action for many years now when faced with a problem. The idea is that with every cloud comes a silver lining. With every problem that arises, there’s potential for improvement and change. You can either view times of turbulence as barriers, or you can view them as opportunities for change that can be harnessed and used to your advantage.
Arguably, Higher Education in the UK has never seen greater turbulence, and it’s primarily, although certainly not exclusively, from financial drivers. Funding from multiple different sources is flatlining or dropping, and our ability to diversify our income streams quickly enough to cushion that is limited.
As budgets shrink and Universities seek to reign in spending, it’s not just a case of doing the same with less but doing more with less. Our leaders are quick to tout “Digital Transformation”, particularly with the advent of AI, as the way to drive efficiencies. However, they are costly and often prone to failure. For those of us in that area we can see such promise, but why is it so difficult to lead them through to their promised land?
Central to the problem is that transformation is costly both in terms of cold hard cash, but also in terms of the human resource. We often see transformation projects as finite with an easily defined start and end date and total project cost. It’s not hard to understand why. Any business not doing these types of calculations is fundamentally opening themselves up to future criticism and failure. You would be laughed out of any bank managers office if you were to present anything else.
What’s often not considered however is the changing nature of projects, particularly over the course of a number of years. New or different requirements, whether necessary or otherwise, is often seen as a weakness, and often discouraged to stay within budget as the primary metric of success. Unfortunately, the outcome is often one that is not optimised to the needs of the business, but instead the needs of the project.
So why are they so resource intensive? For starters, we’re often starting from a very legacy position, so a revolution in systems and practices is often required. These are time and process intensive which leads to a financial black hole and is mentally exhausting for those involved as they often take many months or years to implement with little to show.
Even in times of plenty, the ability for humans to pivot and change can be limited, especially when dealing with new technology. If you couple that with times of famine, and the desire to just get things done and meet already stretched targets, you’re often led with a failed project before you even get out of the gates.
There is however a more fundamental problem. You may have heard the theory in physics that nature abhors a vacuum. This theory states that where there is nothing, something will always try to fill it. This adage can easily be adapted to digital transformation to say that where there is a vacuum, users will come up with their own systems to get round it. So, whilst people work in the background to deliver game changing transformations, they are inevitably playing catch up with where their users have already gone. By the time the transformation is delivered the base requirements have changed and the solution inadequate.
I’m painting perhaps an unfairly negative picture of our sectors ability and desire for change and that is simply not the case. We are a sector, by our very definition, that is used to and optimised for being at the bleeding edge of technology. Our academics are constantly discovering new things and passing them onto the next generation. An annual process of renewal that refreshes and revives. Unfortunately, when it comes to implementation in a corporate world, we often fail to remember the iterative work built on many small mistakes that happened to get it there in the first place.
Therefore, fundamentally, “Digital Transformation” is not a project, but an idea. It’s a process that we lead people into, not through. We will never reach an end point in the future where we can consider ourselves fully “Digitally Transformed”. It’s an alien concept in the modern workplace. It’s a process that doesn’t have a nicely defined end point with careful budgets and contingencies. It’s a people focused cultural transformation first and technology implementation second.
The difficulty is, in a time of crisis, staff are already exhausted and there is a natural tendency to stick with old habits. We do this because the outcomes and the milestones are known. The rules are understood and when the inevitable change of direction comes, we know the human and financial cost of the pivot. Most importantly, it also makes us feel safe.
The unknown is just downright scary, and we Brits are quite risk averse. It’s therefore critical, in times of crisis, that leaders create an atmosphere of safety where problems are seen as opportunities and failures as potential pivot points.
Does that mean that digital transformations must be open ended timelines with bottomless reserves of cash? Not a bit of it! What it does mean is that we need to break the problem we’re trying to solve into smaller chunks and lead less of a revolution and more of an evolution. Smaller chunks lead to lower budgets and less risk of exceeding budgets. They also garner greater support and buy in over the longer term because we see rapid return on investment rather than years of nothing that ultimately disappoints.
The days of massive transformations during times of crisis may be coming to an end, but that’s not to say we can’t make the most of it!
