September 14, 2021 - When you have a complex organization with a lot of moving parts, how do you both eliminate redundancy and duplication, while fostering experimentation and innovation? This is the challenge of organizational and digital transformation.

Okay. Good morning. I’m driving in to work today. It’s September 13th. And I’m just having a lot of ideas mull around in my head on digital transformation. Not only for the shipyard. But for also, what is it? You know, so I’ve got a gonna work on the strategy for the shipyard and then I’ve also got to really lay out the concept map for my dissertation.

Because first, before you can say, what’s something is not you need to also work on the flip side of what it is or I guess a better way to say it. I mean, I needed to find what it is and what it is not so that I can identify the things that are the gaps to it.

That is the the kind of focus point of my dissertation work. As I’m going into it, at least starting out laying out that concept map. And yeah I really thought about of what is it? What defines and I started that process with can and I have to define it.

I think further of there is change leadership. There is innovation. It includes, you know, process improvement, continuous improvement.

It includes project management.

It includes the future of work and includes digital competency if I were to really really think about it. Those are the things that are critical to it. Now, maybe I had some other thoughts when I was running this morning. I don’t remember. That’s what just going through a list, really?

Really comes mine. And then, of course, the change leadership includes the communication and the education, the audience, focus, how to make sure to get the right information, the right people to spire them, to the change and to take action and to reinforce the change, very simply looking at the ad car model as one way to think about it.

Innovation. Of course, that can be fuzzy because a lot of people think it’s new and improved how? Well, which is it improved way of doing things? Well, you’re already doing that thing, new. It’s a new thing to do. Okay, that’s a little little more defined there. Some people think innovation is everything.

Hey, we changed the fonts on the document. How we innovated? That sounds ridiculous. Right. Like now that’s not that’s not innovation transformation. Definitely tucked here of going into that. That’s much different too, but it’s a spectrum, I think that’s important. There’s a spectrum of chain and it’s more often defined by the fact that it is interdisciplinary.

And cross-organizationally intertwined that is important right there and it changes over time that actually, that thought led me to reflections on the digital transformation strategy for my organization and okay. You know, I’m thinking about how these different groups interact especially here is the thing that kind of got me.

The aha thinking about it from the perspective of a single initiative how it changes but between organizations who are primarily responsible is the lead and you know, how do I map that out? How do I convey that information? I am really big on finding a visual way. If you can’t do with a chart or graph icons, you know, graphics pictures of video animations.

What’s the best way to convey the information? And, you know, even just starting out like I thought, for example, you know, how does an initiative, here’s the thought process. How does initiative come in to the organization or get generated within the organization and receive sort of a route to go, who should be involved?

And who should be primarily responsible for it because it falls under their skill side. The one example I thought of was RFID systems and it’s like okay so does it make sense that it’s within the infrastructure groups out and then shipyard for structure optimization program like okay? Yeah because how the funding works the RFID scanners on the building’s half to be treated as infrastructure upgrades and so that goes through different potent money.

Okay. Now, what point does it go from being installed to how it gets used? And that’s a different set of expertise. It the innovation and the standardization of processes. You might do incremental improvements or you might do entirely new and that’s getting more into the project or portfolio management, okay?

With the infrastructure being installed. How do you coordinate the initiative? And oh my gosh, I just had the thought right there. Like oh yeah, project management. We have people responsible for the schedules of ships, but we don’t have them truly responsible for the schedule of transformations. That’s critical. That’s crazy.

Okay, so going through this, this process flow of how it goes through different organizations. So you have the project management that idea of how do we integrate that system with the rest of the shipyard? That’s huge. And then, okay. So it goes from the infrastructure to the use case and innovation to the standardization and then where do we and do entirely new things?

Okay. So now that we have Ideas for how we can use RFID, it goes into digital physical interface. How do we, how do we align, our processes around that to make things happen? And then the next level we’re starting to generate data. So we have to have a data strategy, really what data do we need?

How do we store it? How do we capture? How does it go together? What do we do with it? And designing the data strategy at origin is huge to ensure that we get the information we need out of it or the novel information. That provides new layers, new levels of transformation so that’s the other end of it.

Once we start capturing this data what do we start doing with it? What insights can we capture? And that actually is where it starts to get really interesting because we can rapidly test assumptions that or see how the system could be tweaked. Now that’s something that I think I really want to emphasize this.

How do we create systems where we can change the data capture more rapidly? So, with sensor systems, you have a lot of capabilities of automation, that’s great. And how do you deploy new sensors, different sensors, and pulse, and capture and track in different intervals to provide additional clarity. And that’s something, you know, that’s something fascinating right there, okay?

So you digitize it, you digitalize it, you standardize it and then you can start transforming things because once we know what’s actually happening, we have Identified the real levers, the real levers. And the thing that we have to then identify is how to push them, what is pushing them now?

And how to push them. That right there, is what we’re currently missing. In the shipyards, we have high order, high level metrics of how a project is performing. And yet we don’t have a way to say, for example, something simple that there’s lots of data captured that we can go.

And look at that. We can integrate the information as well as forecast information, as well as predictive patterns, we do not have a way to say how windstorms will affect crane operations.

That was me stopping for a red light. I have stopped but right there. How can, how can we use information on whether to understand the risk of delays on project performance? I mean, it’s real. We know that that shuts down work. It’s just an act of God, right? No planning for it.

Yeah, we have a rainy season. There’s a higher chance. Percent chance of storms. So those are the, the two core ideas that I was really thinking about today. Like, how do I define digital transformation and especially how how does this fit? How do we look at it within the structure of the shipyard?

The organizations that the shipyard and specific initiatives because it writes clarity of who’s supposed to be doing what, at the same time. How think of a lot of us know why? But that could always be reiterated. I think that would be important and app so those are my thoughts.

Curious. What you think about them? Leave a comment, drop it below. Post social media wherever you choose to post and #leadershipdaily. And looking forward to hearing from you. I appreciate you all, talk to you later.