Season 1 / Episode 1
An Innovation Framework for Digital Transformation
Season 1 / Episode 1
An Innovation Framework for Digital Transformation
Featuring
Nick Van Weerdenburg, Jennifer Shannon
Date published
April 5, 2019
Tags
Digital Transformation, User Experience, Business Transformation
Also available on:
Introducing What's Your (R)angle, in our inaugural episode, Jennifer Shannon is joined by Rangle's CEO, Nick Van Weerdenburg as they strip away the confusion of defining Digital Transformation and discuss what it takes to be a player in today's digital economy.
"A digital transformation is about changing your business to participate in the digital economy. Part of that is being more digital in terms of infrastructure, but that is really, a very limited view. That's digitizing the past. Ultimately we want to digitize for the future, and so that's about your digital transformation in terms of your infrastructure, but also more importantly about how you innovate, and how you bring product to market."
Books Mentioned
- From Good to Great by Jim Collins
Introducing What's Your (R)angle, in our inaugural episode, Jennifer Shannon is joined by Rangle's CEO, Nick Van Weerdenburg as they strip away the confusion of defining Digital Transformation and discuss what it takes to be a player in today's digital economy.
"A digital transformation is about changing your business to participate in the digital economy. Part of that is being more digital in terms of infrastructure, but that is really, a very limited view. That's digitizing the past. Ultimately we want to digitize for the future, and so that's about your digital transformation in terms of your infrastructure, but also more importantly about how you innovate, and how you bring product to market."
Books Mentioned
- From Good to Great by Jim Collins
00:00
Hello everyone, I'm your host Jennifer Shannon. And welcome to, What's Your (R)angle? We're kicking off season one with Nick Van Weerdenburg, CEO of Rangle. On this episode, we'll be talking about the digital transformation area, and more specifically about Rangle's innovation framework and key considerations you should factor in, when mapping your digital transformation.
00:17
Welcome, Nick.
00:18
Nick: Thanks, Jennifer, glad to be here.
00:20
Jennifer: You know, there's been a lot of talk, and a lot of buzz, over the last couple years about what the term, digital transformation is, and used in a number of different contexts. When you think about the term digital transformation, what does it mean to you?
00:31
Nick: A digital transformation, is about changing your business to participate in the digital economy. Uh, part of that is being more digital in terms of infrastructure, but that is really, a very limited view. That's digitizing the past. Ultimately we want to digitize for the future, and so that's about your digital transformation in terms of your infrastructure, but also more importantly about how you innovate, and how you bring product to market. How you bring digital solutions to market.
00:58
Jennifer: So, some one of the things that I hear talked about a lot is the idea of the, the lean startup. What does this mean as a part of your digital information, your, sorry, your digital innovation discussion?
01:09
Nick: Yeah, so lean startup was one of the first articulations of lean and agile methodologies in a business context. So, we've had agile development for about 20 years, and it's had a big impact on how we build software. But it didn't really impact how we went to market. And agile is based upon the concept that, you know, we only know so much about the future, so we want to have validated learning. We can only predict the future so much. Lean startup takes that concept, and it applies it to a startup where you're always trying to learn and every time you go to market, you do it with a hypothesis. And you try to validate thos hypotheses and assumptions as fast as possible.
01:47
Can your business have a revenue model? What's your product market fit ultimately? You know, is there, is this a viable customer segment? And by doing that, you can quickly get to the point where you invest your money in the most important areas to grow your company. Whereas historically, people would you know, really feel they should be able to come up with a great idea and build it and launch it, and win in the market. And that wasted so much money, people talked about product market fit.
02:13
Steve Blank, who came up with the concept of customer market fit. You know, you're finding your customers. You're not finding your product, 'cause the product's about you. But then, ultimately it's about the market and the user.
02:26
And so that's lean startup. Which has been adopted by a lot of business but often in a challenging manner, because businesses have a lot more context uh, that they need to address. Lean startup, as described, is about startups.
02:42
Jennifer: So, startups in a smaller company, probably easier than most. But when you move that over to, you know, larger company with quite a few employees, or a company that's scaling up, what are the Pivotal roles that allow an organization to be a lean startup within the organization?
02:58
Nick: So, first off, you gotta figure out what you're doing. You're, you're, you're creating something new. You're creating a digital experience and a new way of going to market. You have to understand what your goals are. Lean and agile practices and startup practices are based about a goal and a vision. So you can't do lean startup within a company without having a vision. The vision itself needs to be built upon the assumptions of what you can and cannot do within a company. Because you know, are you allowed to do something that might compromise the brand? Generally not. So, a lot of risk aversion and a lot of over planning occur in companies because they're afraid to risk the brand identity.
03:36
So, you have to think about, what are the assumptions and where are you allowed to play there. Now, if you get too many of those assumptions, or those, those constraints then all of a sudden you have an idea that doesn't have enough leeway to learn and, and to succeed in the market. So, what some companies have started doing is going off of the core brand. They'll create a subsidiary brand to go to market with, which I think is absolutely fabulous 'cause you have to be able to learn and innovate.
04:03
The other thing is you have to learn fast, and most companies don't want to put out anything that's not complete, because that again, reflects upon the brand. And that's one of the bigger barriers. So not just the, sort of, the brand, but the completeness of the product. Again, going off brand, going with a subsidiary brand can be a solution to that.
04:22
Jennifer: So, that brings up an interesting concept, the idea of a subsidiary brand of the proof of concept. How important is, is that proof of concept process in adopting this, say in a larger organization?
04:33
Nick: One of the amazing things, is that all good ideas end up getting corrupted pretty quickly in new context. And the idea of a proof of concept in a minimal, minimal viable product is incredible. But, again, you gotta think about what's the purpose that it's in service to you? What's the vision it's in service to? And what are the core assumptions that you can sort of explore, and, which ones that you can't? So, what a lot of companies do is they'll, okay we have to do lean startup, which means that we're gonna do POCs, proof of concepts. And if the proof of concept, which is a low cost, sort of, effort, has traction.
05:11
Then we're gonna go and do a minimal viable product. And if the minimal viable product has traction, then we're gonna commercialize it and take it to market.
05:19
You know, what that misses from the lean startup methodology, is that all of these things are in service to a hypothesis, not to the vision. And that's the critical mistake most companies make. What they're doing is they're trying to get things rolling up into a spreadsheet, where they can allocate budget and control product portfolios based upon the wrong metrics. So, you ultimately have to stop, go back several steps, and start with why. Why, are you undergoing this, sort of, innovation initiative? And why are you trying to bring lean startup to these initiatives? And that's because you know, innovation's hard and, you gotta go explore.
05:57
But you know then, what are you gonna measure, and how are you gonna govern the process? And this is where things break down rapidly. So, the budgeting process, sort of frees up a little bit of money for a POC. You go to a POC, then you gotta submit it back to a budgeting committee. Then they look at it, then several months later it can go, okay, this one looked like it had some good metrics. It is spreadsheet driven innovating, and that will always, always fail. And if you get through the POC, what happens is the, the ones that get through, the ones that are actually pretty mundane, and they get a quick click through. It's like click bait on the internet, is that good reading? No, right?
06:32
And the way we roll up numbers from POC's and MVP's, is essentially the click bait of innovation, and it produces all of these failed innovation efforts.
06:43
So, what do companies have to do instead? You really have to come with the 'why', and 'the vision of what you're trying to do', and then you have to set those goals and have the goal, the mission clear to the team and the PLC's and the MVP's, they are in service to that higher order of mission and vision. You're only gonna succeed in the higher order, vision, and mission if you fund it.
07:07
And so now we're looking at, instead of it being like, a traditional company budgeting process, it becomes like a VC process, and you know, one of the, the most, sort of, key wisdom's that I learned when I started, you know, learning more about start ups and what not. I saw a VC speak, and he said, you know, "what I learned was, I don't even look at the business plans anymore, and I don't even think about the idea anymore. I invest in people, not ideas. Ideas are cheap, teams that can execute, are almost impossible to find."
07:36
And, it's a similar thing, so now you know, okay, we're gonna innovate as a large company, we have to sort of, create a vision, and mandate and a mission for the innovation, and once we get to that, which requires a lot of thinking, now we've gotta enable it, and let's say we take a venture sort of type, model. Well now we have to have people that are really good at managing a portfolio of products, and finding the one's, and sort of, investing in them, and committing to them.
08:04
But companies have limited cash, so they don't want to invest deeper in things that aren't gonna produce high payoffs. But often it's because they haven't really got the 'why', of 'why they were doing it'. And, if you can figure out what you're gonna try to do, in a year, what you're top 3 priorities are, where you wanna innovate, what kinda budget would be appropriate for innovating in that space, and what kinda people you need to direct that innovation. Now you can start launching your innovation, and your digital transformation efforts against a vision with a budget, that you can then build and measure and come back with a governance model, that will allow you to scale those efforts and know whether you're succeeding at different levels. 'Cause, if you confuse project level metrics with vision level metrics, you're gonna invariably make the wrong decisions.
08:48
Jennifer: So those, those vision level metrics that you're talking about, who, who should be responsible for those within the organization? Who owns that?
08:55
Nick: Well, that's a, that's a really interesting challenge, because in larger organizations, the higher you get the more fragmented the time, and the faster decisions you have to make with less information, and your instincts and your wisdom is based upon ah, growing up in a business, but that's now aging the digital error, era. And, your skills are now more at handling organizational level, sort of challenges, and coordinating and, executing from an operator perspective. So large companies are really good at operating, they're not particularly good at innovating, and their whole model is skewed towards that. Managing cashflow and managing profitability and managing high level, sort of strategies. So now it's a completely different model, you need to fund innovation, and create a capital pool for it, you have to come up with a different governance model, and you have to have people who are experts in working with that kind of model.
09:49
So, generally speaking that would be, like a cheap digital officer. A CEO might have a hard time doing that, because they have so many of their mandates and you have to get things down to a frontline perspective. So what a lot of companies are doing, is they're trying to find that customer journey that they serve, the digital experiences, customer experiences that they serve. Except that is a top level mandate.
10:12
This is part of our brand, this is how we, we work in the market, and then they find someone to carry forth that from a, a digital strategy perspective.
10:21
There's so many things that can undermine that though, that there really has to be a commitment, and there has to be an isolation of the innovation initiatives with the leader who has the support to carry that forward.
10:33
So often you need to build a subsidiary, or an adjacent organization, or you have to partner with a company that can help you build out these practices where you can innovate and deliver regularly into a market, and you really make the execution of the mission responsible of front line teams, innovation teams, and have a very, very lightweight governance model that brings it back to the executive team, with vision metrics and not product metrics.
11:00
Jennifer: So that's an interesting thing you're bringing up here, which is partnering us with another person or another agency or another consultancy like Rangle.
11:07
And, so what I'm interested in is that makes it much faster, because people are able to partner with people that do it all the time? And what is it about Rangle, that helps companies do it faster?
11:20
Nick: So, as, as Rangle's grown, we've, we've worked across all sort of aspects of the product and platform life cycle with clients. You know, we started off being a, deep experts and modern and next generation technology and helping companies build what they couldn't build, and what we've learned as we got further and further into the organization, what's usually missing is
11:40
The context of what's needed to execute the mission, so what is the mission of the team, and the ability to quickly make decisions. Because, of the sort of, power structures and where approvals have to come from. If you have a product, and you have 4 stakeholders who have a, you know, can get back to the team with feedback on an average of a week. You've now taken something that would have taken a day to turn around, and you've turned it in to a month turnaround.
12:11
Just because you have this, you know, 2 week or 3 week turnaround time, and then you've gotta iterate again, and you have to iterate again, and you have to iterate again. The context for, what the team needs to do, the, the mission orders, the, um, the vision, has to live with the team and there has to be a commitment from the organization to turn around any kind of feedback or approval, at the speed that the team can deliver.
12:33
And, anything less than that will be a broken team that can barely deliver and will end up implementing a low risk consensus based solution. That's when it's finally done is gonna have implemented what you needed 5 years ago, not what you need next year.
12:49
Jennifer: So not as simple as just hiring someone? You have to be deeply committed to the process and be involved, which is the commitment that Rangle asks from our partners, as an example. Right?
12:57
Nick: Yeah, absolutely. You know, any decision has a shelf life and that shelf life's getting shorter and shorter. You have an idea and you wanna take the market. You, you have so many assumptions that you start with, you need to rapidly validate them, and you have to start getting things into the market faster than ever before. If you haven't an idea or concept, and it takes you more than 3 months to get it in to the market, even if it was right when you started with it may be now, wrong at that point.
13:24
The bigger costs is that it doesn't feed back to your next set of decisions. So, partnering with Rangle, we only do things in de-partnership with our client. We look for the alignment and the purpose of the mission of the clients and we always deliver fast, and we always deliver continuously, and we help coach our clients to be able to partner with us at that pace. So a lot of it is, you know, we can handle all the way from vision to implementation and measurement feedback with users, so we have the full lean agile, lean start up, sort of, capability and innovation capability. Now we need to partner with clients and come up with a joint governance model, and a feedback model that we can just keep delivering to the market and feeding those learning back into our partner.
14:10
Jennifer: So, one thing I hear coming up, throughout our conversation here, is the role that data and insights is, is playing as part of this process. Talk to be about the role of data as part of an innovation framework.
14:21
Nick: There's 2 great things about delivering things quickly.
14:25
One is everybody focuses on what's next and not everything, so most companies when you start talking about features people are really scared they're not gonna get their pet feature and so they lobby for it. If you tell them, we'll look at it again next week, you know, step back and focus on what's next. Then people, the cost of making mistake is a lot less, so people now are more willing to make chance, take chances.
14:47
But even with all of that, you have to bring feedback into the team, and if you can get data, and you can get metrics for both, you know, from a user perspective of a product level, and a vision level, and now everyone's focused on, on, on what's real and concrete as opposed to what they're opinion is, and one of the best things about data, is it sort of removes the executive voice from the conversation.
15:13
You're there from a governance's perspective and a support perspective, and a servant leadership role, you're not there to be the smart person in the role that is a decision maker, so that model's so fundamentally broken but without data and without context, it's hard to work in a servant leadership model, and hence companies tend to, revert back to the commanding control higher optical model.
15:31
And, that is antithetical to innovation.
15:35
Jennifer: So, that is an interesting thing you bring up, because traditionally I think most companies would say that marketing owns the bulk of this process, which is consumer data and insights in pushing things out. Um, what role does marketing play in this new world considering that you're actually saying, that a chief digital officer's, as an example, is probably the best owner of this outside of regular business. So what is the role of marketing in this new framework?
16:00
Nick: Yeah, I think the, the concept of marketing and what it used to be. It was taking something and basically delivering it, sort of broadcast style into the world. That was sort of broadcast TV, it was sales brochures, pamphlets. It was an environment where there was no ability to have a conversation.
16:25
So, in today's world everything is conversational and the concept of what digital actually means and what marketing does, I think the term marketing is actually goning be at a date soon, because your business is digital, your business is marketing, it's communication, it's conversational. You know, when you have somebody going through a sign up form, for an insurance product, that's marketing. Right?
16:50
Marketing is not the advertising campaign around it. It's the experience, it's the positioning, and so then there's supporting material, there's supporting conversations, there supporting educational material, it's a really interesting thing. Marketing operations and digital almost become indistinguishable and if you look at SAAS companies.
17:15
A lot of them don't have the traditional marketing department, and there were many years later, where they start to have a marketing department that's doing broadcast ads and, and billboards. What they were doing, was content based placements, pay per click and search engine optimization. Because, the goal was to get someone on to your digital property and then it's about the experience on the digital property that's actually driving everything, and the faster you deliver value the faster you build a deep relationship.
17:46
Jennifer: So, another interest point here, and I like this idea about the focus on the customer experience. I'm wondering if I could get your thoughts around the difference between user data and user behavior analysis, because that's where I think the experience becomes more important here.
18:01
Nick: That's a really interesting question. User data and user experience analysis, are, in my mind, two very different things, because, data doesn't really have a meaning, if it's not in the context of a user that you understand, and an experience that you understand that they wanna go through, and if you don't have that model, then the data can take you in the wrong direction.
18:28
So, you have a user that's coming in to a site and they wat to buy a book, say. Well, if you just look at all users, then you're gonna not really know what is going to deliver value, because you might have 4 different users, who have 4 different, completely different buying personalities, and if you just lump that data, and you measure the data and you look at the funnel as sort a singular thing, you're gonna create a very jagged difficult to use, site. That makes nobody happy.
18:59
But if you think about it, and you realize you have a grandmother or grandfather that wants to read fiction, you have a young boy who likes fan fiction, you have adults who are really busy, they're reading half business and half entertainment. Then you have a completely different potential, sort of, shopping experience. Or, if it's furniture, you have someone coming in to buy something for their home or for their office. You know, I think a lot of things from a digital perspective, and an experience perspective, actually tend to become more diverse over time, because deep experience is to the specific persona and mindset and goal of that person.
19:40
Which, is one of the reasons digital is so important as we build better and better customer experiences and we have a much deeper understanding of users. We need to be building things that are far more profound, ah, and I think what we'll see 5 years from now, is goning to be radically different and deeper than what we experience today on the internet, which is still a one size fits all experience.
20:01
Jennifer: So, you've mentioned earlier in the conversation, the idea of, if you have a product. I've heard you say in the past that, innovation itself must be productized.
20:10
What does that mean?
20:11
Nick: I think innovation is much a process as it is a creative process. Because, if you think about it from what we've been talking about, you know, you can have the best idea, but teams need to execute that idea. Users have to be, um, communicated with and feedback has to be brought back. And, so innovation is an operational process that, sort of, intersects with the creative process, and the leadership, and the insights, and the problem solving. So, I like to describe Rangle as, you know, we have teams of highly committed problem solvers, who are very excited about the new, and they're not afraid of ambiguity.
20:56
Which is a mindset that allows you to happily learn, and struggle against new interesting problems. 'Cause you're looking for what's new, you're actually excited by it, and you don't mind, that sort of, discomfort that's actually what's fun, and that's why you do what you do.
21:11
Innovation's a similar thing, and so if you, if you just look at innovation as coming up with an idea, it gets back to that check list process. If that's what your thought of innovation is, you're gonna create a digital factory, that's gonna do chat bots and it's gonna do sort of, AI proof of concepts, and you're gonna generate no value for your business, because the process of getting something commercialized is so much more, important and complicated than just coming up with an idea. And the mandate is to come up with innovation, that's, sort of, by itself, that's not innovation. That's called playing.
21:53
Innovation is changing the world, it's changing the market, it's creating outcomes that deliver value into peoples lives, and so that's what innovation is.
22:03
You know, it's, it's not a toy. It is significant social value that you're building and delivering. And, so when I say you gotta productize innovation. What you've gotta understand the innovation life cycle, end to end, which includes idea generation, governance model, budgeting, and how you take it to market, how you learn how you... metric division, as well as how you metric the project and the product. How you interact with users, and how you evolve and learn quickly in that environment. And one of the things that really frustrates me is when people look at innovation as a thing that's by itself. Innovation only occurs in the life of users, and that is a really, really big important thing, and it's not done by a small group of people playing with, ah, technology.
22:56
Jennifer: Is there someone out there that you think, wow they're doing it well? They got this.
22:59
Nick: Well. There's a few companies that I think that are doing it quite well, but it's still to be seen, how well it works in the long frame. I actually don't really wanna give any company too many kudos, if they've done something over a 6 month or 12 month period. Because what often happens is, companies start making progress in innovation, and then they try to pull it back in to the rest of the company, and then what happens is, it gets seriously dismantled and fast. I'm amazed at how fast innovation gets dismantled, as other groups start to productize innovation from their prospective. Right?
23:35
So, what they're doing is, they're trying to optimize it in the corporate structure, so a group will often get 2 years to innovate, and they'll make good progress, and then, there's a couple of changes that, that at a VP level, and all of a sudden, it gets pulled back in to the corporate normalcy and processes. Innovation change really takes probably 3 years to really change an organization, and that's if you have the support to actually get to that end to end innovation process.
24:06
So, if you think you're innovating, but you haven't fixed your budgeting process, your governance process, your partnering process, if you haven't given autonomy to a group, to actually run against the vision. You're probably still doing checklist, sort of, spreadsheet based innovation, and you haven't gone deep enough in to the organization to make it sustainable.
24:27
Jennifer: When can you pull it back in?
24:28
What are those signifier's that you can start pulling it back in?
24:31
Nick: You never pull it back in. What you do is, you let it take over the rest of the organization.
24:38
You have to pick a core digital initiative that goes, sort of, end to end, and have that clarity of vision. You have to support and fund it, and when it's successful, you have to have it expand in the organization, because if innovation during an organization is radically different than a traditional organizational model.
24:59
So, what you do, is over time it becomes your organization. So, building an adjacent organizational, sort of, process to drive innovation and then moving more and more of your organization over to that model, while measuring it and making sure it's not regressing by having the right organizational change metrics, and the right innovation metrics.
25:21
You can get to a point now where your organization can truly innovate. Usually it goes for a little while in one department, and then it stops.
25:31
Jennifer: So, you have been in this space really on this, sort of, you know, the 2 years out edge, and you're investing in things in your business, and that can be seen, but if you were gonna say to people, okay this is the things that you need to be watching out for, thinking about better 2 years out, that are gonna have a huge impact on this space.
25:48
What are those things?
25:49
Nick: The biggest thing that's gonna have an impact here, is that, are the things that we can't predict. Which is why it's so, so important to get a good, sort of, innovation and operating model that can do innovation, built in to your organization. You have to be able to pivot your organization, and rapidly move and adopt new areas where you can deliver value to your users, otherwise your business model will get disrupted.
26:12
There's a great story in, Measure What Matters by John Doerr, about Intel, where they were getting threatened by Motorola and 16bit processors. Intel decided that they had to change their messaging to the market, because they were losing market share and they were able to turn that around in a few months by being able to execute it operationally.
26:39
Companies have to have that wired in their digital methodology, because it could be AI, and AI will have an impact. But, we don't know if it's 2 years or 10. It could be that data, that again, we don't know. And data's actually very hard to make use of, if you can't connect it to, actual innovation type processes, because data is a conversation, but if you can't talk back, you're not having a conversation.
27:07
So all this investment and data, without the investment, and digital innovation, is a waste of money. And companies are gonna build the wrong data lakes, and the wrong data platforms, because it has to feed that conversation back in to the market. So data feeds innovation, and if you can't innovate fast then you, and you really can't update your data, then you're really just looking at broad trends and you're not getting really close to the market.
27:32
So, I think that's the most important thing, is we don't know, what we don't know. So, data, AI, all those things, are gonna have a massive impact. We don't know 2-5 years. But, the impact's also gonna speed up, because of the ability to build more profound digital experiences.
27:50
If you have to re-write your platform again every 3-5 years, you're not gonna be able to get deep enough to actually create those more profound digital experiences.
27:59
So, not only do you need to move faster, to have conversations, you know, like digital conversations with the market, you need to build something that's gonna last for 15, 20 years of qualify, is non-negotiable.
28:12
If you have a team that's pushing to hit deadlines, because, that's your traditional go to market model, and you compromise on quality and you compromise on building a platform, and you compromise on learning, and you stop learning, just because you're trying to hit a market, 'cause your company's anxious, then you're gonna fail and you're not gonna be able to innovate because you compromised the platform, and finding the right operating model to continue that conversation.
28:37
Jennifer: So, there's someone out there listening right now, and they work in a big company, and they're thinking to themselves, no, today's the day.
28:43
What's the one thing that they can do to start the conversation?
28:46
Nick: I think there's an amazing opportunity for companies now to really embrace these modern digital, sort of, go to market methodologies. The key thing is to really get to truth.
28:58
You have to understand what you need to do to be successful. So, if this one person, they wanna move forward, they know what they wanna do. You have to start with, 'why, in the vision', and if you have that, then you can have those conversations about, um, looking for the right partner, or the right process. But it has to go and ultimately, it has to go high up. It's gotta be sponsored, 'cause you gotta change the governance model, or you're just gonna built something and it's gonna be tepid.
29:27
Jennifer: You've always been a company that has, a sort of, ah, invested this, sort of, partnership model. Are you finding that more and more, as companies are coming to you or looking for an innovation partner that, the willingness, or the ability to embrace a partnership model, is getting easier, or different, or is there a change that's happened?
29:48
Like, instead of just solving these problems inside their own companies?
29:51
Nick: Yeah, I think there is. So, companies are really, really, sort of, frustrated with their ability to get to market with new innovations, because they're complex organizations, and they're optimized for something different. So they're great at what they do, and they should actually celebrate and be happy with how they work.
30:07
They do what they do, really, really well, which is why they're there. But the world's changing, and so they have to change with it, and they need to embrace different ways of operating, and it's really hard to do that change in mid-step.
30:22
But, the other models don't work either, like you can't just ask someone to, you know, rebuild your company for you, because it's not your company then. It's not your instincts, it's not what you're the best in the world at.
30:33
The Jim Collins, From Good to Great talks about finding out what you're the best in the world at, and building your business around that, so a very large company can do that. What are you the best in the world at? And, what do you need to do to really take that in to the, the digital space. Your optimized for one thing, you now have to build an adjacent part of your organization that's optimized for something completely, completely, different, and you can't underestimate how hard that it.
30:58
The whole nature of what we're talking about is conversations in a highly complex market where the innovation, the problem solving are happening all the time. So, if it's not connected in the organization, it's not gonna work. But, the organization's not wired for that connection, so that's why all these companies are blocked, that's why agile transformations really get blocked for years, and digital transformations. And, you know, the companies start defining digital transformation, as putting stuff on the cloud, but they end up putting on the cloud, you know, what they used to do, so now they're digitized, and they've digitized the past, not the future. They're not ready for the future.
31:36
So, what Rangle does is, we partner at every step of the way, we don't take any power away from our clients, everything we do is fully transparent. We don't pretend, you know, that we know more than they do. They know their business. We know how to execute in this kind of, an operating model, and we have the technology skills, and we plug it in at the right points with our clients.
31:57
So, the top level from a governance and budgeting process, from a program management perspective, so, how we communicate and give feedback. How we jointly learn, so that our partnership model evolves, because we are bringing 2 cultures together, all our projects are run the same way and, this is the only way we work, so we're always getting better at it.
32:19
And, what it does, is it gives, it gives a new model, gives a different model. Nobody does this traditionally, 'cause it's really, really hard. It requires a deep collaboration, and a deep partnership between 2 organizations, on a weekly basis, and that's actually pretty amazing to see that in practice, and it's quite thrilling, 'cause as Rangle, we get to connect in to this profound knowledge of our clients, and understand their business models and bring our ability to do digital innovation and execution, and together, that's magic.
32:53
Jennifer: And, I guess the, the real winner here is, the consumer. The customer?
32:56
Nick: That's why we're all here ultimately, it's all about the user.
33:01
Jennifer: Thank you so much for joining us today, as always.
33:03
Please subscribe to ensure you're notified about all future episodes.
33:07
Thank you so much to our guest, Nick Van Weerdenburg, CEO of Rangle. I really appreciate your candor and willingness to share your insights. Thanks Nick.
33:14
Nick: You're welcome. Thank you.
33:15
Jennifer: We hope you got some great insights today too, as well, and we would love to hear back from you.
33:19
So be sure to send us all of those comments and questions.
33:22
Thank you so much for listening today, and have a great day.
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An Innovation Framework for Digital Transformation
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