If you have made it this far, congratulations: you have survived my onslaught of ideas, suggestions, and stories. You are probably excited about getting started but also overwhelmed and unsure where to begin. If you are C-level employee, then you might well have the power to make some of the changes suggested in this book, but if you are middle management, you may be facing a harder battle. Fear not! There is a way to get going for everyone, no matter what your level in the organization, and the first step is an easy one. If you look at the definition above, a strategy is always in service of a goal. So, your first step is to decide what your goal is?

In her book Get your Sh!t together, Sarah Knight describes a goal as a version of winning. She asks, what would it look like to really win in your life? I would translate this to “What does it look like for your <insert department, job, or organization here> to really win at digital? “ The kind of win that would have you doing press releases, dancing in the streets, and planning celebrations with your staff. If you are in the lending area, maybe it's the two-page digital loan application. If you are in the call center, maybe it's leveraging artificial intelligence to answer 35 percent of the calls that come in. If you are the CEO, maybe it's a full digital platform that can be leveraged across the organization. If you are in HR, maybe it's a comprehensive workflow that includes onboarding and training all staff digitally. What would make your organization and its customers happy?

So here is a good place to stop and meditate a bit on this; it might take a few days to formulate your goal into concise sentence. Something like “It will only take our customers 5 minutes to get a loan,” or, “No customer will wait for more than 30 seconds to speak to a representative,” or “Our digital platform will allow continuity across every department.” Whatever it is, write it down, and stare at it for a while. Once you have your goal, the harder part begins. It's time to develop a strategy around achieving your goal. Here are some questions that need to be answered.

1. What exactly is your goal? It's time to go from the sentence to the full description; be as specific and descriptive as possible.
2. How long will it take to reasonably achieve the goal?
3. Who will you need to make it happen?
4. Who will try to stop you and why?
5. How will you pay for the resources to make the goal happen?
6. Can the goal be broken into phases?
7. What is the value proposition of the goal to the organization?
8. How will this goal affect the culture of the organization?
9. Will the goal require hiring people?
10. Will the goal result in firing people?
11. How will you monitor your goal's progress?
12. What are your leading indicators?
13. What are your key performance indicators?
14. Is there data available to support your approach?
15. When happens when the goal is reached?

These are all critical questions that need to be answered so that you can develop a plan of attack or a strategy to deliver the goal. Your digital strategy is the beginning of your digital transformation. It doesn't have to be an all-encompassing strategy; it can be a smaller strategy if it is adopted by the right people. For instance, suppose the goal is to improve your wait time in the call center. You might be able to make this happen with a product or service that could extend to the rest of the organization, so you do want to make sure that you socialize your goals and get some understanding of its collateral effects on the organization. Therefore, it is necessary to fully define your goal. If your goal includes a new website with a flow, don't be afraid to grab a piece of paper and draw it. In fact there are many tools on the Web to allow you to easily mockup a digital process (for example, balsamiq.com, lucidchart.com, moqups.com, or wireframe.cc, all of which have free tools). I can hear you saying that your I.T. department would never allow you to use these sites or download this software. OK, then go to your local library and do it there. You must want this—that's why it's your “dancing in the streets” goal.

Now that you have the first iteration of your strategy finished, it's time to get real with the goals. This book is broken down in to six distinct parts: Processes, Technology, Security, People, Culture, and Strategy. Each section has information on how these areas of your organization can either help or hinder your goal. Let's go through each section and use it as a guide for your strategy.

Cultural Issues

How does your goal fit into the culture of the organization? For instance, if your goal is a sales goal and your organizational culture is based on service, then you may find that there will be resistance to implementing your processes or purchasing the necessary assets to achieve your goal. Identifying how your goal fits on the organizational culture is a critical step before presenting it.

Will your plan involve changing the culture, even if it is just your local department culture? For instance, let's say that you are planning on creating a digital workflow that would improve your process for reporting lost or stolen cards, or how account closing is handled. Any change of process is going to affect your culture. It's important to understand that most financial organizations are not “change friendly,” and as a result, the culture in it is entirety is very static. If you are going to introduce a change, you must think through how that change might impact the culture.

For example, any digital workflow that reduces manual work is likely to be viewed by staff as an attempt to reduce the number of employees by replacing them with automated processes. If your change will require you to add resources, employees may be worried about overhead in their department or competition for their jobs. The sad part is that almost any change will be viewed in negative light by some or all the organization. As someone who has introduced a fair amount of change at the organizations I have worked at, I can truthfully say that there is always a group of people who will find the negative in the planned change no matter how positive the outcome of the change.

In the examples above, how will you counter these concerns? For example, with the digital workflow that reduces manual work, what can you do with the recovered time? For instance, if the process you digitized used to take minutes and now takes less than 30 seconds, what can your employees or your teams do with the extra time? Could the time be used to increase engagement with the customers? Are there things that would be nice to do but you never had the manpower do to them? If you are going to add resources for your new process, how will you introduce this group into the culture? It's one thing to hire a new employee now and then, but it's a different game when you bring in 10 or more people at once.

Does your new idea or process run counter to the culture of your organization? If your organization is not a heavy sales organization and you are introducing a process where employees are expected to sell a product or upsell items, you may be in for a big surprise. If the culture of the organization will not support the idea, you will encounter strong headwinds. It's not impossible to introduce an idea that is counter to your culture; however, you must approach it in a much different way to accomplish your goals. One approach is to introduce the idea to influencers first.

Understanding who the influencers are in your organization or department will save you a lot of time when implementing a change. Instead of teaching the entire staff or department, start by chatting with your influencers, get their feedback, and determine their concerns. Getting them on board will go a long way to the success of your strategy.

People Strategy

If there is one thing I have learned, its never to go into battle alone. If you are planning a new digital process or any kind of change, it's important to socialize the idea in smaller circles to get feedback. Rather than be blindsided by staff, its far better to get feedback from smaller groups and identify supporters along the way. The feedback allows you to develop counters to the issues that will be raised, and the supporters will be first adopters who can assure the rest of the group that the change isn't a bad thing.

The second question you need to answer is the WHO. Who are the people that you will need to accomplish your goal? On the website you will find a strategy startup guide that you can download and print. It would be a good idea to download this guide and start filling in the answers to the questions. Please be specific with the who, if you can. If you write down “information technology,” please specifically say who it is in IT that you will need to accomplish your goal.

Now that you have the who, it's time to determine the length of time it will take to accomplish the goal. One issue with determining the time frame is that you often don't control the resources that you will need to accomplish the goal. Don't worry about this for now; pretend you have unlimited resources, funds, and time to do it perfectly and outline what you need to get the job done.

Process Changes

If your new idea is going to change processes that are outside of your control, then you must deal with this directly. I have a good story about this. One day I was working with one of my team members on a very early version of home banking. We were in the middle of implementing check images. Up until then, if you were reviewing your history online and you saw a check, you could only see the amount and check number. With the new technology, were able to allow the customer to click on a link and see the back and the front of the check, which included the memo field and the payee field. Being the nerds that we are, we thought this was the coolest thing ever (remember, this was in the late 1990s). The employee I was working with was also an expert in the platform that our teller and call center staff used to support customers when they call in. Together, we hatched an idea to make it so that the tellers could click on a link and see the check images as well. The employee I was working with went back to his office, and a hour or later came back to my office and showed me he had implemented this. We both thought it was pretty cool and thought nothing more of it. At the time, the organization had just installed a Citrix environment that allowed for all of the desktops in the organization to be virtualized. Little did I know that when the employee modified the software to pull the check images, he modified the main image that all of the tellers and customer service representatives used in the organization so other employees could see it as well. The employees came in the next morning to find that they could access checks from within their terminals (these were green screen terminals, so it was a pretty cool trick for back then). They noticed the link and clicked on it. This would've been fine, but the organization was being charged per check pull. Needless to say, it didn't take long for accounting to find me and ask why the check image cost was so high. In fact, the number was very high to my way of thinking. Since I had never informed anyone else in the organization that we had rolled this out, I had also upset many of the managers who were blindsided by questions from the staff about it. They asked me to turn it off, but I couldn't let go of why the number was so high. I could see people just playing around, but that should fade over time. I was concerned that maybe I had introduced a security issue. So I went to a branch that was nearby my house and visited the teller line, as this branch seemed to be among the biggest offenders. I asked if they had seen the feature and what they thought. I was blown away by their response. They said, “We love this feature! Instead of going and manually pulling a signature card when a customer wants to do a large transaction, we can just click and compare their signature to a few checks. It saves us tons of time.” So this story had a happy ending, but had I followed a better process to inform the staff and socialize the idea, I could've avoided the animosity and trouble that I caused for other managers.

The important concept here is to try to account for the unintended consequences of a process change. In today's hyperconnected digital world, most processes will have unintended consequences. To the extent that you can identify them either by thinking them through, socializing the idea, or researching at other organizations, the collateral effects can often be avoided.

Technology

Here are a few rules of thumb that I use for technology strategies.

Is the technology you are upgrading to or implementing at least 50 percent better than what you have today? As I mentioned in earlier chapters, most banking technology is 85 percent the same and 15 percent different. The key here is to make sure that the effort it will take to change or implement the platform is worth it. I have seen many organizations bounce back and forth between credit card platforms, lending origination, and servicing platforms, expecting dramatic change, only to find out that the platform isn't that much better than the platform that they replaced, and they find themselves years behind in their project plans due to the implementation of the new platform.

It's important to consider the amount of effort that it will take to implement whatever you are planning and weigh that against the benefit of the new software. I find that in most cases, rather than replacing a platform, it would be better to work with consultants or that company's professional services to extend the platform to accommodate feature gaps. While this approach cannot go on forever, it is useful to keep a platform in play until there is a transformation that makes it worth the work to do the conversion.

The digital governance group should also be engaged before starting the project. This group can make sure that your project is in alignment with the technology standards of the organization. They can also review your project schedule to make sure there are no collisions with major organizational technology plans. For example, if your project is a new lending process and the technology group is planning on upgrading the lending platform, then you may want to wait to start your project so that it doesn't interfere with the upgrade, or perhaps there is overlap with the new features the upgrade will provide and your project. The technology group will help you to identify these issues and align your project with their plans.

If your project requires additional technology resources to complete, then the digital governance group will help you understand the technology impact of your project. A good example of this would be if your chosen product provider only supports a Linux operating system and your organization is primarily a Windows organization. Then the digital governance committee might inform you that it does not have the expertise in house to support a Linux platform and will ask you to include the cost for a new FTE to support the platform. Another example is if your product is only supported in an SaaS model, and your organization has never implemented an SaaS product. The digital governance group will need to review or change its policy on delivery via SaaS platforms.

What are the data analytics implications of your project? Will your project provide new metrics or data that could be valuable in other parts of your organization? For example, if you are implementing an enterprisewide calendar system that allows customers to schedule appointments with your financial specialists from their cell phone, what kind of data can you collect from this new system, and how can it be used to benefit the organization? This is the purpose of engaging the data governance group before you start the project. This way, team members have a chance to identify any data that would be valuable to the organization and work with your technology provider to collect and store the data for future use.

Security

This is most tricky part of the strategy section, because it involves being ready to abandon an idea if necessary. When working on a new idea or process, it is important to engage security with an open mind. Security personnel can make or break you. Security can either decide your idea is too risky and kill it or decide to help you. It most cases, your approach to the project will be the factor that determines how the security team or person will respond. Here are a couple of key items to consider when approaching security.

It is also recommended to perform your own risk assessment before you bring the project to security. Using the project risk assessment forms on the website, you can identify many of the business risks and security risks for the project before you approach the security group. This process also allows you to have some ideas for remediation of immediate issues before you approach security.

Try to get Security's blessing early in the project timeline, rather than waiting until the end. Security may have ideas to help with your project, but it may take time or resources on their side to help you get to the finish line. The sooner you get them involved, the more time they will have to implement changes, make purchases, or finish a task or project that may help your project. On the other hand, if there is a security problem or risk with your project that makes it either cost prohibitive or not feasible, it is better to know early on before you spend a lot of the rest of the staff's time.

It is also important to look at other similar-sized organizations that provide a similar feature. Often times, if you can point the security team at successful implementation of a product or process at another organization, they can work out how they did it and gain some perspective on your ideas.

Don't be afraid to do your own security research, if you know there is a questionable aspect of your idea. You can use this amazing website I discovered called “Google” to research the security concerns and come to the table with some concepts or solutions that others have used in the past. It's important to recognize that you are not a security professional and perhaps the solutions you are looking at are not feasible for your organization. However, most security professionals will respect your effort and appreciate the time you have put in to trying to help them along in the process. Security research is always valuable—even if it is off base it may help you to spawn new ideas or new ways of thinking about a problem.

The most important question you can ask yourself is, “How does my idea or goal fit into the overall organizational strategy?” If you are a CEO reading this book, chances are you get to set this strategy with your executive team and board and you are living out the strategy each day, but if you are part of the executive team, or middle management, then it's your job to identify every opportunity to support the strategy. It's important to recognize in your everyday work if your actions are in support of the organizations strategy, particularly in the digital space. If you find yourself reworking a process that you know ultimately will need to be digitized in the future, are you really supporting your organization's digital strategy or are you prolonging the inevitable? For each manager, implementing strategy will depend on the ability to balance the strengths of the manager's part of the organization against its weaknesses. Leaders who work hard to understand their organization's strategy will find that they can easily identify which projects they need to do and, more importantly, the projects they should not do. Strategy is the measuring stick we use to define what is in the scope and what isn't.

The goal is to achieve strategic clarity in your organization. If any member of your organization can clearly communicate the strategy of your company when called upon, and more importantly, can explain how they are personally executing on the strategy, no matter their position in the company, then congratulations! You have achieved a Zen-like clarity, and you should be proud. However if members of your organization complain that there is a lack of communication, or they feel like there are too many priorities, then it is likely that your message got lost along the way. Organizations that are caught in strategic paralysis often have a great business strategy on paper. But if the organization lacks the ability to communicate the strategy beyond the boardroom, and lacks the technology to continuously provide easy-to-understand updates on the key performance indicators to everyone in the organization, then they will find that their employees are often frustrated and confused as it relates to how they can participate in the company strategy.

Finally, what happens if you follow all the rules, you do everything that this books says to do, and you fail? Have you planned for failure? The first thing to do is to redefine failure—the word itself is misleading—did you really fail, or did you miss a goal? I like to reframe failure into two categories. The first category is setbacks. A setback means that you have encountered a problem that has forced you to rethink a portion of the project, or it has caused someone to start over in an area. Setbacks should be expected in any project. The good news about a setback is that you can recover from it.

The second category is learning opportunities. This is for a pure failure of a project—whatever you tried to do, it flat-out failed. These should be considered learning opportunities. Learning opportunities can be planned for ahead of time as well. Make sure that you identify the learning opportunities for each project you take on before you start the project. This is helpful to do beforehand because you can also include tasks such as documenting certain aspects of the project in detail in support of the learning objectives. This way, if the project should fail or be a setback, the learning opportunities that were identified as part of the project charter can be looked upon as a valuable asset of the project, as opposed to throwaway data.

When it all comes together, a goal that is executed within this framework can be extremely satisfying. Goals that are aligned with the strategy of the organization are important indicators to management that their strategy is being understood and executed on by the entire staff.