Digital Transformation Challenges - Tim Bottke with Monitor Deloitte & Author of Digital Transformation Payday

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tim Bottke, author of the new book Digital Transformation Payday. Tim and I talk about the challenges of digital transformation initiatives and how companies can better approach the implementation and measurement of them. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript with Tim Bottke, Senior Strategy Partner at Monitor Deloitte and Author of Digital Transformation Payday

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Tim Bottke. He is Senior Strategy Partner at Monitor Deloitte, and author of the new book Digital Transformation Payday: Navigate the Hype, Lower the Risks, Increase Return on Investments. Welcome to the show, Tim. 

Tim Bottke: Hi Brian.

Brian Ardinger: Tim, I am excited to have you on the show. You've got a very interesting book about digital transformation. What is digital transformation? 

Tim Bottke: You know what the funny thing is. Like over these four years of research, which I spent preparing, the book. Became clear, there is just no single universally agreed definition of what digital transformation is. And that's driven by the fact that so many different interest groups have worked on the topic. Each with their own agenda.

And very often you'll find that the key word in this term is transformation. And digital, it should be it, it is not always like that should be means to an end, which is transforming. And transformation is also no objective by itself. It needs to happen to make sure that a strategy is established, which helps companies win in the marketplace.

And very often you see with clients and also all the companies I researched for the book, that people transform but don't know what to transform to. And that's why people often ask for a definition. And the definition is it's about a transformation with the objective of being able to have sustainable success in the marketplace. And digital is a tool to do that. There are many others. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'd love to get a little bit more background on like, how did you get involved in digital transformation and the research that you've been doing on it? What got you excited about it and how did you get your expertise? 

Tim Bottke: I've been a consultant now for more than 20 years. And like transformation was always a topic in all these times. Whenever I had, we had the early stage, we had the e-commerce boom. I've been in all these faces, and I work in the TMT industry mostly, so, which has always been more digital. At least that's what we believe than many other industries. 

And that's why with all these companies going up, down, growing, being restructured, transformation has always been there. So it has always been a key interest area I've had. And that's why when the digital transformation hype and I'll call it came up, it has come up several times. It just became the core of my work because there was no transformation where there was no digital inside. 

And then I had, I still remember this meeting with a dear, really dear client of mine, a CEO who basically said, look Tim, two more years as a CEO in this company. Maybe three. I want to do bigger things. We both know I need to transform this company. Digital transformation is the term. It costs half a billion, and I'm sure I would not see any single benefit while I'm still the CEO. 

Is it not a better idea if I start wearing jeans and trainers? As of next week, I make my investor relations team paint our annual report with a lot of digital AI, whatever the term is.

I invest 50 million in this case, in major startup city of the country, put an incubator and then have some innovation speeches written for me, et cetera. Is that not better and safer for my career? Tell me if I go the other route, what will shareholders benefit really? Please tell me and had no answer.

And you know how frustrating that is. At least to me. It was when I couldn't really give a good answer. And it was also clear that mumbling along, throwing a few buzz words wouldn't solve it. So, I went on a quest to solve it. I first started internally. Then no one had the patience to really dig into it because it was, you know, everyone was running high speed digital transformation project after project.

No one wanted to question the bigger theme of value, et cetera. But I still got the go from our leadership to work on it by myself. So, I went back to academia. I found out no one has solved it there either, even though IT transformation, you know, has been a trend for long time. IT value has been assessed in hundreds of articles and books, but it didn't ever jump over to digital.

It was rather the claim people saying, no, these rules do no longer apply. Now it's digital. We don't need KPIs. It's all about scale. It's all about different KPIs. It's let's be Agile. Look, all these things. And then I started saying look, there needs to be a data driven answer. And that took me some time because I also had a job to do in parallel. I'm still a consultant after all, but I fixed it. I solved it. And that's where this book came from. 

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. My understanding, you spent about four years researching it, and looking at different ways companies are approaching digital innovation and that. So maybe we'll start with the question, you know, where do companies get digital transformation wrong? You know, what does the research show? What are some of the pitfalls that people are encountering? 

Tim Bottke: The good thing is I think there is just one single pitfall everyone needs to be aware of. That digital transformation is an end-to-end journey. And no matter what you do. And I have a framework in my book, which is explaining a bit what end-to-end means. But wherever you start, you need to be sure that you know where you want to get. 

So very often the key thing that companies get wrong is they believe they need a digital strategy, but they don't from my perspective. What they need is a strategy, a strategy to win in the marketplace. And very often in current times, digital can play a key role in it. But they often think if they implement the coolest new CRM system cloud-based with AI supported analysis engines inside. 

I think the two of us could throw buzzwords now for the next 10 minutes. That this will change anything in terms of success for them in the marketplace. But it doesn't because very often all competitors work on similar things. They very often even use the same software. So, they have the same systems. Often in a few cases, even the same consultants with Chinese walls or whatever.

But so they will never end up in a place where when they finish and they never do, they will be better off compared to where they were before, vis-a-vis competition. They might be a better company, more efficient, leaner, faster, but what if all your competitors do the same faster at the same speed? Then you end u...