Data-driven operating models: The key to silo eradication

2020 marked a significant acceleration in the digital transformation of many organisations. We hear consistently from our clients that last year didn’t dramatically alter their digital plans, but programs that were intended to be delivered over months had to be delivered within days.

What is top of mind now, as we move forward, is how can we maintain this digital transformation momentum and keep digital on the agenda with the board and the c-suite? To do that, the leaders of the various functions within the organisation need to come together and stay together.

What allowed many of our clients to move quickly last year, was that teams across the organisation had to come together and solve for a joint outcome. The urgency forced historical debates regarding “who owns what” onto the back burner and, instead, leaders across the business focused on how quickly they could work together to achieve an outcome.

I had the opportunity to speak to Peter Weill of MIT on the topic of digital and business transformation. Peter is the Chairman of MIT’s Centre for Information System’s Research, and if you care about Digital and haven’t connected with Peter then I strongly encourage you to do so.

Peter shared that, from MIT’s research, it is critical for leaders to align on a small set of metrics that everybody can access in real time across devices to ensure they are all shooting for the same thing.

Aligning on the data and metrics that are defining success allows the organisation to break down silos that in our experience can be one of the most significant barriers to digital progress and transformation.

At Adobe, we’ve been talking about data-driven operating models – or DDOM - for a while. So much so that we’ve done a case study on our own transformation of our Creative Cloud business with DDOM.

Delivering transformative, engaging, digital experiences is dependent on the teams that collect customer data to engage deeply with the teams who are building the creative and mapping the customer engagements with the teams who are responsible for the digital infrastructure.

Driving alignment across the organisation is critical for transformative customer experiences because the customer experiences just one organisation, one brand. The customer doesn’t differentiate their support experience from their shopping experience. It is one company to them.

Aligning on the data, and all working towards shared metrics is how we can continue to move forward with digital transformation at pace.