Ian Steward, Chief Sales Officer, Tricentis.
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While this past year has presented significant challenges for a lot of companies, it has also led to an exponential growth in digital services. Business leaders remain under pressure to move to digital operations, find new channels for innovation and reduce expenses. Under this pressure, it’s easy to make mistakes that can negatively impact growth, such as setting unrealistic targets for cuts, failing to sustain behavior changes or investing in too many new areas at once. It’s important to recognize the pitfalls business leaders should be wary of and identify a path forward for digital innovation to assist in top-line growth while keeping costs low. Four standout actions have served me in my role as chief sales officer and can help leaders form their own path to successful innovation.
Simplify Change
To start, change should not be a grueling undertaking. Leaders who partner with business sponsors to identify new initiatives are saying “yes” more. They have won confidence by simplifying change and derisking implementation.
Simplifying change is the first step CIOs and business leaders should take when considering digital growth and innovation. This starts by fully understanding the impact of the initiative on business risk and providing continuous validation of quality around those core processes throughout the initiative. A prerequisite to simplifying change is engaging business users to identify the relevant measures that build confidence in the release process, which will reduce the possibility of production defects and outages. Having these structures in place will allow growth to occur easily through agile practices that bring products to market more quickly.
Remember Cost Reduction Is Residual
Once you fully understand what change needs to occur and how to derisk it, make sure not to lead with cost savings in mind. Cost reduction-focused initiatives tend to allow for the cost to propagate in other areas, as the core need wasn’t addressed. Do not allow cost reduction to be the focus of your new program and the main reason you are making these decisions. Rather, allow cost savings and increased efficiency to be the byproduct of the innovation you are driving. CIOs my team and I speak with are aware that cost savings tend to be the result of efficiency and productivity gains versus simply ridding themselves of certain parts of their infrastructure and changing services. Understanding this will allow you to focus on the primary objective — innovation.
Pair Agility With Quality
My team and I often hear from CIOs that they need to innovate, modernize and migrate to modern platforms while reducing technical debt. Their ability to “make it so” and deliver value on big ideas is essential to their reputation. Confidence is a CIO's biggest weapon, and it's embodied in the statement from Phil Fasano, CIO of Kaiser Permanente (a client of Tricentis), in a podcast episode of "CIO Classified:" “Look if I said it that means that anyone who works for me understands we are going to make it so.”
Being agile and faster to market is always the end goal, but this cannot be at the expense of quality or you risk losing customers and employees due to a poor experience. Making change a positive experience for the end users and delivering on initiatives lead to more funding and innovation through business sponsorship.
Test, Test, Test
Speedy innovation can result in increased risk and allow for potential defects to go out unnoticed. At a large-scale enterprise, the volume of transactions running through their system is huge, and downtime from improperly tested changes can cost millions. All business leaders want to increase change and enable more data to flow through their applications, as opposed to the traditional paper process. However, few organizations implement enough disciplines of testing.
Data integrity, exploratory and performance testing are often considered luxury items. Before you innovate anything (replace a system, make an update, migrate from on-premise to the Cloud, etc.), you need to fully test the application to understand its thresholds, scalability, data impact and risk to the organization. Testing allows companies to save money by reducing "technical debt" and getting rid of applications that are not suitable for the business. This includes not being scalable enough in the cloud, having too many defects or not releasing updates often enough.
CIOs understand the importance of time to market. However, if you rush products and innovation before they’re ready, you’re going to incur huge, repetitive costs related to fixing things that should have been done right in the first place. Companies can improve speed and efficiency by simplifying change, savings through productivity gains, moving at a safe pace and thoroughly testing along the way.
