As an example of a digital transformation launch, Mr Modi’s Digital India initiative set a vision of a fully connected country as the basis for a completely paperless e-government, along with e-delivery of many business and welfare services via tens of thousands of Common Service Centres (CSCs) across the country. This initiative required basic technology training, providing a digital identity and affordable smartphones to all citizens. It also required the laying out of a transformation organisational structure with leaders at all important levels, along with clearly defined responsibilities and KPIs, detailed transformation reviews with publicly available results and feedback, and the commitment of substantial government investment as well as securing participation from select members of the private sector. As another example, General Electric is well on its way to digitally transforming itself. GE formed an organisation called ‘GE Digital’, and its CEO, Bill Ruh, who is also the CDO of GE, has the vision of making GE the first truly digital industrial company. GE’s digital transformation has been launched with a bimodal approach to maintain the necessary balance between current and future business models. The initiative also has clear goals of improving internal productivity, and fundamentally altering GE’s customer relationships while promoting new products and services.[3]

Should a digital transformation launch be incremental or a big-bang approach? While good examples of top-down, comprehensive and enterprise-wide transformation launches can be cited, such as at Adobe and Burberry, there are also many examples of large companies that started project-based ‘skunk-work’ style digital initiatives within some divisions, acquired smaller companies with digital capabilities and offers (as GE did) or even launched a fresh start-up-style company (like Gisbert Rühl, CEO of the German steel company Klöckner, did). These examples were all intended to gain an initial experience of the digital way of working before embarking on an organisation-wide programme.

In general, digitalisation imparts a culture of rapid decisions and experimentation, and in particular for incumbent organisations, many deviations from the standard way of working; these deviations require adequate mechanisms to properly steer and adapt organisational functions in a range of areas, as necessary, from planning to investment to execution. 

hese mechanisms collectively are termed digitalisation governance.

Governance is essentially about setting up control or check points during the progression of initiatives, to assess progress and to ensure that the activities preserve relevant fundamental principles, stay within the accepted norms of the organisation, and that they are best leveraged for achieving the target goals. While the concept and use of governance is not unique to digitalisation, certain aspects are either distinct or specially emphasised:[4]

• Two key goals – coordination, i.e. enterprise-wide alignment and prioritisation of initiatives, and sharing, i.e. using/reusing common capabilities and information across initiatives
• Shift from a strongly hierarchical command-and-control governance to a commit-and-coordinate style
• Encouragement of out-of-the-box thinking, experimentation and risk-taking
• Mindfulness of the balance between operating procedures and flexibility so as not to lower organisational flexibility.

The success of digitalisation governance relies on the governance framework being light (minimally sufficient) and transparent. Organisations excelling in digitalisation typically have top leadership being active in and promoting digitalisation governance, often via the office of the CDO working through departmental liaison, promoting and sharing digital assets and best practices. 

Good digitalisation governance not only helps keep the digitalisation journey on track, but also accelerates it.[5]