How do you inspire companies to take on digital transformation, even if they don’t have the money up front?
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no title5 years ago
A very wise friend of mine used to remind me regularly, help the people who want your help.
no title5 years ago
Exactly, and that way you start small. They don't have that 20 million upfront, but as you go through that journey and you show customers how you transform, how you do things differently, all of a sudden you start to see how that drives cost savings. You can redeploy staff to other things that are maybe higher margin for you. Don't try to boil the ocean right away. That's the biggest mistake.
It's a classic problem and every business faces it. We'll sit down with customers and say, "Let's write a press release. We're going to release something in five years from now." It seems silly to them at first, but we look at where they want to be, and then we work backwards from that. It really becomes intuitive. We don't have to build that thing on day one, but at least we know the vision that we're driving towards. We start, we fail fast, we iterate and then move forward. It is a much different way of working and thinking. Companies that embrace that have a much better idea of, not only what they want to do, but where their customers want to be, and then how to take the steps to move towards that. When I talk to customers, we'll get everybody hyped up with all the amazing things you can do to transform your business. Then it comes down to, "Oh my God, where do I start?" I can guarantee you in every business there is some group or person that wants to be first adopters. Start there. Don't start with transforming your full IT staff, or vacating 10 data centers in 2 years. Start with the first adopters, the ones that are asking for this transformation. From there you can pilot things, test it out, and prove the model. All of a sudden you start getting inertia within the company. They see the advancements are being made. I always tell them, let's start with the group, business unit, or team within your company that has been asking to do things differently. They're going to be open to it, they're going to be motivated to do it, and they want to prove to the company that there is a different way of doing things.