By: Jason McFadden

Published: March 2022

Becoming a digital business is no longer an option. This message comes through loud and clear in seemingly every keynote, panel discussion, article, or study related to how organizations can remain competitive as the world becomes increasingly reliant on digital technology. What's not clear to many business leaders is how to successfully transform as entire industries are disrupted and reconfigured.

"Just look at the numbers - 70% of complex, large-scale transformation initiatives don't achieve their objectives."

Just look at the numbers - 70% of complex, large-scale transformation initiatives don't achieve their objectives.[1] What do these failures have in common? Contributing factors include high aspirations without strategic focus or a clear vision of the desired outcomes, insufficient investment in digital capabilities to sustain the transformation and a lack of engagement within the organization.

Your business may have already defined their digital vision and roadmap, run end-to-end pilots that demonstrate the value of the investment, and initiated a plan to become digital. But if your organization is like most, you could still find yourself struggling to deliver digital value at scale, scope, and speed.

So how can you beat the odds?

Invest in building an ecosystem of technology partners

Over 89% of the top companies globally have a robust ecosystem of trusted technology partners to help their business become digital at its core.[2] The partner ecosystem can include cloud providers, digital platforms, SaaS providers, management consultancies, and software development firms. Everyone works in unison to provide holistic solutions consisting of digital products, technical infrastructure, business consulting, custom software development, and managed services.

Leveraging this approach can alleviate funding shortfalls and ineffective operating models. It enables you to kick off your digital transformation with enough human and financial resources to get started, expanding as changes take hold, and delivers digital value to the user, customer, employees, and the business sooner.

If your organization lacks the experience and digital capabilities required to manage the speed and complexity of change that digital transformation requires, you may be tempted to fully outsource all development of digital applications, cloud infrastructure, and managed services.

On the contrary, we believe that digital transformation should be led and executed from the inside in collaboration with key ecosystem partners. Digital is the future, and to win, your team will need to learn how to run digital-enabled businesses to avoid over reliance on external vendors.

This is where the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model comes into play.

It’s the perfect method for businesses that are ready to transform but lack the necessary digital capabilities and talent to do so successfully. With a BOT model, a business can enlist the help of a partner like Build with Assembly to stand up, build, operate, and eventually transition back the digital asset, application, cloud infrastructure or platform.

During each phase of the stand up and build, your team works alongside ours, learning and being supported by market-leading digital talent certified in the latest technologies and highly experienced in building and managing secure, enterprise, future-ready digital solutions. When it’s time to transfer back the digital asset to your organization, your team will have the digital capabilities required to manage and innovate.

Start today.

In closing, your toughest competitors, the ones you need to worry about, are certainly not taking small steps toward becoming a digital business. They are writing the playbook on “how-to” successfully transform, in fact, digital leaders have grown at five times the rate of laggards over the past three years. They’ve done this in part by successfully executing the strategies outlined above - building strong alliances across their partner ecosystems and leveraging new ways of delivering digital value that compressed their time to market and, therefore, time to value.

We believe our place in the world empowers organizations to build digital value and capabilities at a rapid pace simultaneously. So, if you’d like to learn more about how we’re helping leaders champion being digital, we’d love to hear from you. Let’s connect.