I arrived in the last weeks of my maternity leave. One of the big pros of maternity leave is actual time to think and reflect (in between nursing my baby of course). Five years ago I started to look into digital transformations and I was a true newbie to the topic. Of course I was familiar to the subjects the big software integrators were marketing. Blockchain, AI, Internet of Things to name a few. But I had literally no idea of its value or how it worked in practice.
Agile just became mainstream and the next big thing entered the chat: digital transformation. Suddenly, all of our clients happened to be in a digital transformation of some sorts. I learned about the terminology like incumbents and speedboats. Unicorns suddenly got an entirely new context, just like operational and customer excellence.
Together with enthusiastic colleagues at Prowareness (my employer at the time) we experimented with a digital transformation model. We had many valuable discussions about the subjects and learned a lot from each other. Next to that, I facilitated workshops and spoke at events about our findings.
Since April 2019 I work at Blue Bricks, but my interest in the topic didn’t vanish. On the contrary. I continued to study the phenomena, read more, extended my experience in the field at my clients and discussed the topic with (new) colleagues.
During my maternity leave I also like to challenge my brain a bit and came across some articles in the latest editions of Harvard Business Review. I came to the conclusion that I look at digital transformations entirely different then five years ago.
For instance, disruption! I knew the notorious examples of Uber, Kodak, Blackberry, to name a few. Videoland and Netflix too. Disruption and new business models were the next big thing. before you knew it, you’d become irrelevant in your industry as an organisation. However, is that really true? And if so, how would that happen?
While I transition slowly (I like to extend the summer for a bit) back to work, I’m happy to share some more about my findings and experiences. Curious to here yours as well!
Essence of Change 