A successful digital transformation must be based on a comprehensive roadmap. Here's some tips for building one.

Every engineer knows that digital transformation will trigger critical changes in their organization’s operations. Digital transformation integrates digital tools and technologies with revised business processes to revolutionize business operations.

That’s easier said than done. The real challenge lies in execution. Starting with a digital transformation roadmap helps turn ambitious goals into tangible digital outcomes that produce business benefits.

A digital transformation roadmap elaborates the high-level strategy into a guide for navigating the complex journey of integrating more digital technology into most business areas. The roadmap bridges the gap between your long-term digital vision and the multiple projects needed to turn the vision into digital reality.

A successful digital transformation roadmap isn’t a plan; it’s a strategic guide for navigating the complex journey of integrating digital technology into every area of your business.

There’s no simple formula for digital transformation or a one-size-fits-all solution. The digital transformation will likely look different even for every company that competes in the same industry. The differences result from various factors, including size, history, in-place technology, degree of centralization, leadership styles and culture.

Digital transformation drivers

The drivers that are causing many organizations to invest in digital transformation include:

• Fewer customers shopping in person and more shopping online.
• More employees working remotely part of most weeks.
• Pressure from competitor actions or to gain competitive advantage.
• Increasing customer expectations for product quality and customer service.
• Increasing product and service complexity requiring more multi-disciplinary collaboration.
• The availability of cheaper and more capable information technology to support digital transformation.
• Improved digital data quality to support digital transformation.

Value of a roadmap

Because digital transformation has a wide-ranging impact on the organization, it’s easy for senior executives, engineers, various stakeholders and project teams to lose track of the vision and strategy. The value of a clear, actionable roadmap includes:

• Ensuring that digital transformation projects are well aligned with business goals.
• Communicating the vision and strategy to maintain organizational commitment to digital transformation.
• Translating sometimes vague digital transformation concepts into multiple clear, actionable objectives that individuals can understand and support.
• Providing an initial insight into the resources the digital transformation projects will require.
• Guiding the projects that will implement various parts of the digital transformation.
• Keeping project teams aligned and focused while understanding their work’s broader digital transformation context.
• Avoiding common pitfalls that impede digital transformation.

Scope of a roadmap

Surprisingly, the scope of digital transformation roadmaps is similar across industries. They typically include many of the following:

• Enhancing the customer experience through technology.
• Leveraging internal and external data with analytics for insightful decision-making.
• Streamlining product design, manufacturing and distribution with process automation.
• Shortening and reducing the complexity of the supply chain through improved digital collaboration with suppliers and dealers.

• Applying available digital technologies to advance the business plan.

Steps in building a roadmap

Engineers typically collaborate with other professionals to build a digital transformation roadmap using the following steps:

1. Define a digital vision for the organization and seek senior executive approval.
2. Develop a digital strategy that captures business process and technology opportunities while recognizing people and facility constraints.
3. Seek senior executive approval for the digital strategy.
4. Confirm the collaboration and people change management strategies.
5. Build a list of digital transformation projects that implement parts of the digital strategy. Ensure every project advances the strategy.
6. Build a high-level plan for every digital transformation project. Ensure no project is planned to run for more than 10 – 12 elapsed months.
7. Describe the required project team skills and experiences. Estimate the approximate effort needed for each role for every digital transformation project.
8. Sequence the digital transformation projects. Prioritize low-complexity, high-value projects earlier. Recognize precedence relationships across projects.
9. Select the appropriate supporting digital technologies and tools. Employ in-place technology where possible.
10. Define the risk management process and the initial risk list with recommended mitigations.
11. Develop a management strategy for project governance.
12. Conduct a short pilot of digitizing a business process using the selected digital technologies and tools to confirm the planned approach.
13. Revise the roadmap based on findings from the pilot.
14. Seek roadmap approval from stakeholders and senior executives.

The digital transformation roadmap implements the strategy that describes the following topics:

• Organization-specific digital transformation drivers.
• The organization’s current state of digitization and automation and how much the digital transformation is expected to advance digital work.
• The approximate amount of business process change, people change, and digital skills upgrading that will be required.

The following categories of digital technologies, tools and data should be considered for the digital transformation projects:

• Advanced data analytics tools.
• Generative AI software.
• Hybrid work management software.
• External data.
• Simulation software.
• SCADA/IIoT systems for operations.
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.
• Custom software development tools.
• Cloud service providers.

Steps in executing a roadmap

Organizations execute the approved digital transformation roadmap using the following steps:

1. Execute the next project in the approved sequence.
2. Review project outcome against project goal and strategy.
3. Refine the roadmap based on project learning and changes in the business environment.
4. Revise project scope definitions based on the previous step.
5. Return to step 1.

Every digital transformation project will include examples of the following deliverables:

• A list of business processes to be improved with rationalization and digital support.
• Additions to the computing infrastructure.
• Additions to the list of datastores.
• Custom software for datastore integration.
• Implementation of apps and SaaS solutions.
• People change management.
• Data quality improvements.

If sufficient resources are available and projects are truly independent, it may be possible to execute two projects concurrently. The benefit will be the earlier start of the benefits of the digital transformation roadmap.

How to recognize a superficial or ineffective roadmap

Engineers can recognize a superficial or ineffective digital transformation roadmap if it contains one or more of the following features:

• Restates the vision and strategy without offering elaboration.
• Discusses technology at length, perhaps to the exclusion of business issues.
• Relies on leading-edge technology.
• Fails to reference the associated business process changes.
• Discusses intangible benefits in detail.
• Omits estimates of tangible benefits.
• Describes the required projects in great detail or not at all.
• Omits a risk and mitigation discussion.
• Contains only cursory references to people change management.
• Proposes a pace of project work that will overwhelm the organization.

A comprehensive roadmap will guide a successful digital transformation and reduce the risk of failure among the projects implementing the strategy.