Along Came a Spider
The Folklore Problem
There’s too much folklore in technology — lots of “let me tell you a story about why our customer account numbers are 22 digits long with no spaces allowed and require seven consecutive zeroes in the middle” and even more “Well, this is how things are done in our industry, so that’s why we have to do it this way.”
We (tech people) tell the same stories about the way we think technology will be used when we are selling to clients (“This technology will increase consumer engagement with the brand!”) and we tell the same stories about why technology failed to fix the thing that technology broke in the first place (“You see, Apple changed their app rules, and that changed the way our data model worked, and because of that we can’t…mumble mumble mumble….”).
Finally, we get to the ultimate form of technology folklore, in the general form of “we’re going to use Technology to Transform our Business” which follows the same story line of an alchemist trying to turn base metals into gold.
The problem is that the technology folklore starts to be treated as received wisdom of the elders, and so the technology stories we tell must have some core truths about The Way Things Must Be. But, deep down, we all know it’s not the technology that transforms anything. It’s the knowing of how to use technology — at every level — that actually makes positive change happen.
COVID-19 Revealed the Truth
It was, of course, COVID-19 and the frantic rush to work from home that revealed how real “digital transformation” is minimally about technology. Ironically, people in the tech industry know this deeply. They also know that absolutely nothing about jumping to remote work in 2020 or 2021 required new technology — not Zoom, not Microsoft Teams, not Slack or Discord or any of it. All of these are just continuations or improvements on technologies that have existed in some form literally for decades:
All the tech was and is already there — yet it was not widely used outside of the “tech” people. Why? For many organizations in the frantic rush to work “digitally” there were huge revelations:
“Pre-Digital” Managers lack object permanence.
If they can’t see the workers, they must not exist. Of all of the challenges, the number one issue was the utterly absurd question, “How do I know if people are actually working when they are at home?” and this resulted in even more tech being piled on to track the work people were doing, sometimes literally watching people via their cameras. Things have improved in the last 12 months, but not that much.
Tech skills matter at all levels and in all roles.
Many people — and in some companies most people — have no idea how to use a computer in general. They use it “ritually” not thoughtfully and without with any real level of understanding of what is happening behind the screen. Change an icon or rename something — they are utterly lost. Without the person down the hall to help them right-click on an image, they simply cannot cope with their computer.
Governance of digital processes matter.
A lack of clear process description and governance — especially when it comes to workflows done exclusively online — made remote work nearly impossible for some organizations. “How we do things online” was remarkably ad-hoc. Absolutely critical workflows were often (still!) entirely paper dependent. In the year 2020. One example: a company had an HR process that had no possibility of e-signatures — and could not hire or fire people remotely as a result.
IT was right all along about how fragile things are.
For years IT has been begging for money to upgrade systems, to ensure continuity of operations, to move critical systems to the cloud, provide additional training, and so on. Forced migration to virtual operations reveled just how right they were.
The Spider Model Emerges
Over the course of helping some clients cope with their remote-work conundrums and, more recently, fixing unfinished or poorly executed digital transformation projects, we found that there were always eight “legs” that have to work together — equally — for a company to use technology as a strategic advantage, not just a cost center, and the “Spider” model was hatched.
The key points:
- The Spider Model is an Operational (not technical) approach to digital/technological transformation.
- Each “leg” has a unique set of capabilities and maturity benchmarks, but all eight legs must work together equally.
- The body of the spider — the coordinator of the legs — represents an operational leadership role in the organization, optimally a “C-level” position, or at minimum is a direct report to the CEO.
