Agile CIO

Being told that your business is going to be transformed sounds scary. Transformation is the sort of word that sounds frightening and fraught with risk when you’re told it is going to happen to you, … and celebratory looking back at your achievements.

When broken down into a sequence of small steps, though, it can be achieved with little risk.

Take The Guardian for example. The Guardian wanted to transform its business by moving the Guardian Unlimited news website onto a new content management platform to provide a more attractive offering to users, provide them much more flexibility in managing their content and give them improved opportunities for advertising.

A similar story is true at the Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT). 5 years ago, as Jane Scott Paul, the AAT’s Chief Executive said recently, they set out a plan to transform themselves into an organisation that is attractive to their target audience - their members - to enable them to access the vast majority of information and services online.

In both cases, rather than take a “big bang” approach to transformation, they have approached it in a series of small, incremental steps. The advantage of this is that the financial exposure and general risk is significantly reduced and there is early assessment of the real business benefits.

So, the key to business transformation without the fright factor is incremental implementation. This reduces both financial exposure and risk, and allows the transformation to be validated (and adjusted if necessary) throughout the process - a classic application of agile techniques.