Ask the experts: Digital transformation means uniting all teams in a single vision


Bharat Bhushan, partner and chief technology officer for KPMG, and Jonathan Lister Parsons, chief technology officer and co-founder of PensionBee, discuss effective communication for digital transformation


PART 1: FIVE THINGS YOUR TECH TEAM WANTS YOU TO KNOW


1. What you want and why you want it BB: Digital transformation isn’t about installing new tech toys in the organisation. It starts with being clear on your vision, purpose, and strategy at the top of your house. Then establish what enterprise and technology architecture you need to support it and map out the skills and talent taxonomy you need.


JLP: Digital transformation is about changing the mindset of a business to digital by default. The transformation is in the opportunities this brings for customer experience and engagement, products and services, operational effectiveness, and data-driven decision-making and capital allocation. Don’t put technology on a pedestal. Recognise that the point of technology is to deliver something. Therefore, think of it as a facilitator.


2. What is possible BB: Most organisations, particularly in the financial services sector, realise that cloud computing can enable business transformation. I see data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning as part of that. For example, the move to Open Banking means that third parties can look at my financial data and predict the transactions with a high degree of accuracy


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and recommend changes that can help me to live a better economic life. Am I paying too much for my utility or subscription services, for example? There’s a massive role for AI and machine learning in this space. Other technologies are in the earlier


stages of establishing themselves. For example, financial institutions could use quantum computing for risk modelling, creating new products and services. Digital can bring greater maturity in self-service.


3. Why it’s essential to comply with security legislation JLP: Better security, including internationally recognised standards such as ISO 27001 certification, which demonstrates that your business has systems in place to protect corporate information and data, has helped with the adoption of cloud-based services. What’s also helped is the EU’s General Data


You need to cultivate a shared language


Protection Regulation and the US’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which establishes national standards for protecting certain health information. Being incredibly careful about the


security of the data and having that privacy overlay means there’s control over


what people can access and what rights people have to that data, which means you can build operational processes off the back of it. For example, cloud providers can


handle payments for you so that you, as the business, never need to take credit card details, enabling you to focus on products and services.


4. How to cultivate a shared language between teams JLP: An ongoing challenge is to develop software and products in a genuinely collaborative way between the business and technical sides. You need to cultivate a shared language. What doesn’t work is when your business analysts write a requirements document using words like ‘orders’ and ‘customers’ that make sense to them, then the technical people look at it and put together a technical requirements document. It doesn’t have any of the words in it, and it doesn’t make any sense to the businesspeople. So, they’ve got no way of evaluating whether the thing being designed will solve the problem. You need a shared vocabulary where the technology people learn about the business. That’s a challenge. Domain-driven design, which matches software taxonomy with input from business experts, helps with that, but it’s not as big as some other philosophies, like agile, for example, which talks about collaboration.


THE REVIEW MARCH 2023


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