The Role of Visioning in Digital Transformation

Traditionally, the systems and application development community has approached building information technology from systems thinking, not from the conversational structures of the targeted profession—be it accounting, architecture, or healthcare. This is an inverted approach to developing software technology because information systems are not a determinant, but a tool for conducting the network of conversations and interactions that occur in a profession more efficiently, at lower cost, or in a transformative way.

The industry response to that inverted approach was a humanist movement that proposes a human-centered orientation to design. The pitfall of many methods we analyzed in this trend was that practitioners brought their technical mindset and systems-centered thinking with them to do the human-centered thing.

In our work serving digital transformation in large initiatives for enterprise business applications, as well as digital engineering, we found it more to the point to focus on a profession-centered orientation to design. But in order to avoid the aforementioned pitfall, we had to figure out what had to change, first, to avoid being blinded to the larger realm of concern for human behavior in the workplace.

We had to set course, from the start, with a new approach that focused on understanding the fundamental tensions that underlie a profession’s competitive landscape. And most of all, the client had locate their offerings in that landscape to rapidly produce a highly competitive technology portfolio in a desperately competitive marketplace.

“Although it is often helpful to use methods for evaluating and choosing amongst alternatives, these methods are harmful when they blind us to a larger realm of concern for human behavior.”

— Flores and Winograd, Understanding Computers and Cognition

Invest in Visioning to Get Started

Locating yourself in a profession’s landscape begins with visioning, is followed with strategic re-orientation, and then sets out to build a profession-centered model for their business technology. The last step, implementation, or migration of legacy computing requires that technology decision-makers exploit the plethora of web services and platforms being offered at many levels of the enterprise computing stack nowadays. The strategic objective? Join the digital ecosystem to enjoy a negligible cost of implementation and ownership.

Competitiveness in the digital economy requires not only the reduction in the cost of developing and owning technology solutions, but also making your products and services available globally. This blog is focused on the first practice: visioning, which is a business practice focused on exploring possibilities. Other installments will address the other two.

Visioning is not dreaming up stuff. Visioning is making new interpretations of situations from a reframed worldview, with focus on finer-grained services to supplant the previous generation of computing infrastructure. The absence of that focus is what we call “disharmony” in visioning, a phenomenon that many business leaders bump against as they are confronted with the changing competitive landscape and the prospect of digital transformation. Disharmony in visioning is when the approach taken is at variance with the new value system of the digital economy.

The Difficulty Grasping Visioning

Visioning grounds your business intuition and maps it to the real business and professional concerns you have set out to address.

Visioning is practice that helps you articulate a vision so that others can see what you see. You cannot create that which you don’t have clear language for.

Because visioning is about possibilities, not opportunities (not yet), it is a practice of observing, listening, and receiving as an exchange between you and your potentiality. It includes looking at technology affordances (what the marketplace offers) and applying them to the fundamental tensions of the profession.

Visioning is neither something you get to, like a goal, by applying some stepwise process, nor a systematic procedure that will get you to a specific “solution.” Visioning consists of developing business narratives for “harmonizing” your assets, which broadly means bringing the required elements together to make something new that is coherent and complete appear to you. This aspect of visioning is crucial to grasp for technology decision-makers.

Visioning is an experience, a phenomenon that becomes present to you once you get it, just like getting your balance for the first time on a bicycle. A vision eventually emerges but only from the authentic pursuit of a vision in its pure sense: a vision is its own measure; it does not have to justify itself as compared with anything else.

Strategic Re-Orientation for Setting a Competitive Course in the Digital Economy

Once the visioning practice is concluded, the next step for business technology executives is to reset their strategic orientation. This happens before strategic plans, roadmaps, and implementations. My next blog will cover strategic orientation.

Ernest Stambouly is a technology executive bearing on 34 years of experience in enterprise computing, he practices as a Digital Business Coach and Enterprise Computing constultant. He is the author of Surviving Digital Transformation and Ethos of Change, and advisor for modern IT portfolio management at Achillis Inc.

Share

Tweet