After working as a consultant for 19-plus years now—meeting customers daily, attending workshops, and listening to business issues to develop solutions—I wondered why IT transformation often fails to deliver the expected results. It took me a few years to gather enough knowledge across multiple fields to build a big picture. During the journey, I discovered, much to my surprise, that information technology organizations fail in the basics, or even neglect some components, leading to a deficit in the digital transformation. This was when I started drafting the IT transformation guide for the next-generation IT (IT-TNG framework).
The IT-TNG framework is focused on practitioners, not on theoretical knowledge. Each guide helps a practitioner achieve a specific function using tested methods and concepts from the industry. Each guide balances theories, practical steps, and management practices. This structure aims to empower whoever reads these books in their current role and provide them with the knowledge to take a more prominent role in the organization.
The IT-TNG framework consists of the following practices:
- Process: Process reengineering
- Digital solution: How to develop a digital solution
- Solution HL design: Align requirements to design
- Services: How to build a service offering to the customer
- Value support: How to support a service in the best possible manner
- Value maintenance: How to control the technical aspects of a service
- Service adjustments: Decision-making and service components adjustment
- Value realization: Promote and discover services
- Innovation: Generate innovative ideas to solve business challenges
- Strategy and effort orchestration: Developing synergies from all practices
Figure 1 IT-TNG framework
Each of these modules is independent, and although each represents a layer in IT that should not be neglected when considering digital transformation, two or more practices generate synergy and start driving improvement. A single practice will drive value, but you need at least three practices to drive the digital transformation forward.
The organization might already have a functioning practice representing one aspect of the IT-TNG. In such a case, keep it as is. The idea is to build the missing parts of the 10 core practices regardless of efficiency. And once you create the whole stack, you can go back to optimize these practices.
While writing the IT-TNG, I followed a focused approach with two principles in mind:
- 80/20 rule
- Law of diminishing returns
The 80/20 rule means you don’t need many initiatives to achieve the best results. You only need a handful of initiatives to reach a strategic position. The law of diminishing returns means that with every improvement, you gain less, so it’s about finding the pressure point and pressing to get the maximum results with the least effort. I also considered the unintended effects of applying these practices. For example, thinking critically about a software design unintendedly challenges the value, reduces change requests, and increases business alignment.
This is what all of these practice guides are about, the minimum possible resource investments that will drive value.
Figure 2 Ten practices stack
The practices have no specific order, but there are 10 levels. Start with the core activities in each layer, and once all ten practices are stacked, you begin expanding each practice layer based on the organization’s need. If you try to grow one layer before making the core stack of all 10 layers, you will hit the collective ceiling blocking value realization, regardless of investment. To avoid hitting this and wasting resources, you should build the initial layers first to proceed in a value-adding manner.