Violeta Tudose

Roadmap to Digital Transformation

Case: Huld Ltd

Metropolia University of Applied Sciences

Master’s Degree
Degree Programme in Business Informatics
Master’s Thesis
17 November 2022
Abstract

Author: Violeta Tudose

Title: Roadmap to Digital Transformation
Number of Pages: 96 pages + 5 appendices
Date: 17 November 2022

Degree: Master of Business Administration

Degree Programme: Business Informatics

Instructor: Antti Hovi, Senior Lecturer

Today, digital transformation is everywhere. The digital opportunities are evolving faster than
the pace of transformation in the organizations. To leverage these opportunities quicker and to
overcome the possible challenges faster than the competitors, a growing number of
organizations across different industries have systematically started to enhance their culture,
operations, and capabilities for the workforce of the future. This phenomenon is called
acceleration of digital transformation.

This thesis focuses on determining clear path to the acceleration of digital transformation for
the case company Huld Ltd by creating a roadmap that can be part of its growth strategy.

This study utilizes the Applied action research along with qualitative research method,
gathering qualitative data via questionnaires, interviews, publications, and other online
channels analysis to find the best-fit solution to overcome the organization business challenges
and reach its digital ambition.

By assessing the current state of the existing digital transformation maturity of the case
company, the study synthesizes the key areas to focus on in its digital transformation journey.
A far more effective way for achieving better business outcomes is looking at the best practices
the leaders as Accenture, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and McKinsey operate in
accelerating digital transformation across their organization and to introduce their ways of
working into the case company.

As the outcome, this study suggests clear and effective ways to overcome the barriers on the
path to digital acceleration when building a digital transformation roadmap. The roadmap
defines three major elements needed to reach the digital transformation acceleration:
implementing a systematic approach in decision making, building digital capabilities for the
workforce of the future, and creating an agile culture and a new way of working. By doing these,
the case company can better deliver relevant business outcomes to customers with fast
payback and enhance employee performance.

Keywords Digital Transformation, Roadmap, Operations Optimization,

Digital Talent, Dynamic Organization
Preface

The journey of this thesis topic started on 4th of April, 2021, when the COE Director,
Riku Rennicke had introduced us the COE strategy as part of the new organizational
change using the Center Of Excellence (COE) model. Along with presenting the COE
mission and steps for reaching the COE goals, Riku empowered us to come up with
ideas and work together to improve the processes going forwards.

At that time, neither my MBA degree program nor my Master’s thesis work started. But
to make sure we are setting up and running a successful Center of Excellence to reach
the goals efficiently, I have started to better prepare myself for the new Huld leader role
and anticipating the challenges ahead.

This Thesis develops a roadmap to plan out company’s digital strategy for 2-3 years into
the future and serve as a baseline for similar organizations willing to adopt digital
transformation as part of their business strategy.

It was very enjoyable for me to have a supportive environment at Huld, the company
where I have been working for the past 10 years. I appreciate my colleagues’ interest in
my work and their support, for which I would like to thank them very much. In particular,
Riku Rennicke (Embedded Solutions COE Director) and Mikko With (COO) have actively
supported my research. I wish to thank them both.

I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Antti Hovi, Senior Lecturer at Metropolia
University of Applied Sciences, for the excellent guidance and support during the
process. I carefully chose you to be my supervisor because I knew you would provide
me the opportunity to embrace new challenges. This has helped me gain the right
perspective and grow as an expert, for which I am very grateful.

A special mention goes to Zinaida Grabovskaia as a second reader of this thesis and a
great motivator. I am indebted to her for the insightful comments that helped me improve
this thesis.

Finally, I want to thank my husband Christian and my daughter Sofia for being there for
me. I would also like to thank you, my reader. I hope you enjoy reading this thesis.

Violeta Tudose

Espoo

17 November 2022
Contents

Glossary
List of Figures

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Business Context 1

1.2 Business Challenge, Objective and Outcome 2
1.3 Thesis Outline 2
1.4 Key Concepts 3

2 Method and Material 4

2.1 Research Approach 4

2.2 Research Design 6
2.3 Data Collection and Analysis 7

3 Current State Analysis of Digital Transformation 10

3.1 Overview of the Current State Analysis 10

3.2 Description of the Current Digital Transformation Journey 13
3.2.1 Business Strategy Driven by Digital 14
3.2.2 Leveraging the Power of Data and Technology 15
3.2.3 Operations 16
3.2.4 Personalized Customer Experience 18
3.2.5 New Digital Services and Business Models 19
3.2.6 Digital Talent 19
3.2.7 Dynamic Platform Organization 21
3.3 Analysis and Findings of the Current Digital Transformation Maturity Analysis
24
3.3.1 Strategy 25
3.3.2 Technology 26
3.3.3 Operations 27
3.3.4 New Growth 28
3.3.5 Customer Experience 30
3.3.6 Digital Talent 31
3.3.7 Dynamic Platform Organization 32
3.4 Summary of the Current State Analysis Results 33
3.4.1 Strengths and Weaknesses 36
3.4.2 Selected Focus Areas 37
4 Existing Knowledge and Best Practice for Creating a Roadmap to Digital
Transformation 39

4.1 Selected Knowledge Areas for this Thesis 40

4.2 Element 1: Operations Optimization – Systematic approach in decision making
41
4.2.1 Definition of Operations Optimization 41
4.2.2 Operations Optimization Features and Benefits for the Digital
Transformation 42
4.2.3 Operations Optimization Analysis 46
4.3 Element 2 of the Conceptual Framework – Digital Talent 48
4.3.1 Definition of Digital talent 49
4.3.2 Description of Digital talent Best practices for a successful Digital
Transformation 49
4.3.3 Digital talent Analysis 56
4.4 Element 3 of the Conceptual Framework – Dynamic organization 58
4.4.1 Definition of Dynamic Organization 58
4.4.2 Description of Dynamic organization Features and Best Practices 58
4.4.3 Analysis of Dynamic organization 64
4.5 Conceptual Framework of This Thesis 65

5 Building a Proposal for the Digital Transformation Roadmap for the Case Company
69

5.1 Overview of the Proposal Building Stage 69

5.2 Findings from Data 2 (pulling together CSA, CF and Data 2 for the Proposal)
70
5.3 Proposal Draft / Initial Proposal 73
5.3.1 Element 1 of the Initial Proposal: Operations Optimization –
Implementing a systematic approach in decision making 75
5.3.2 Element 2 of the Initial Proposal: Digital Talent – Building digital
capabilities for the workforce of the future 76
5.3.3 Element 3 of the Initial Proposal: Dynamic Organization – Creating an
agile culture and a new way of working 78
5.4 Summary of the Initial Proposal 79

6 Validation of the Proposal 82

6.1 Overview of the Validation Stage 82

6.2 Developments to the Proposal (based on Data Collection 3) 83
6.2.1 Developments to Element 1 of the Initial Proposal: Operations
Optimization – Implementing a systematic approach in decision making 83
6.2.2 Developments to Elements 2 of the Initial Proposal: Digital Talent –
Building digital capabilities for the workforce of the future 85
 6.2.3 Developments to Elements 3 of the Initial Proposal: Dynamic
Organization – Creating an agile culture and a new way of working 86
6.3 Final Proposal 88

7 Conclusion 91

7.1 Executive Summary 91

7.2 Managerial Implications (Next Steps and Recommendations toward
Implementation) 93
7.3 Thesis Evaluation 94
7.4 Closing Words 95

References 1

Appendices

Appendix 1. BCG's Digital Acceleration Index Questionnaire (Data collection 1)

Appendix 2. BCG's Digital Acceleration Index Questionnaire Responses (Data collection

1)

Appendix 3. Digital Transformation Acceleration Questionnaire and Responses (BUs,

Data collection 1)

Appendix 4. Digital Transformation Acceleration Questionnaire and Responses (COEs,

Data collection 1)

Appendix 5. Workshop for Building the Proposal (Data collection 2)

Glossary

BU Business Unit. “An organizational structure such as a department or team

that produces revenues and is responsible for costs.” (Garbelli, 2013).

CoE Center of Excellence. “An organization unit that embodies a set of

capabilities that has been explicitly recognized by the firm as an important
source of value creation.” (Frost et al., 2002).

CX Customer Experience. “A totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and

behavioral consumer responses during all stages of the
consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-
purchase stages.” (Kolekar, 2021).

EX Employee Experience. “Companies and their people working together to

create personalized, authentic experiences that ignite passion and tap into
purpose to strengthen individual, team, and company performance.”
(Dhiandra et al., 2018).
List of Figures

FIGURE 1 RESEARCH DESIGN OF THIS STUDY.................................................................................. 6

FIGURE 2 4 STAGES OF THE DIGITAL MATURITY MODEL (BCG, 2020). ........................................... 11
FIGURE 3 DIGITAL ACCELERATION INDEX DIMENSIONS (SOURCE: BCG, 2020). ............................. 13
FIGURE 4 DIGITAL VISION AMONG THE COES VS BUS (RESULTS FROM DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
ACCELERATION QUESTIONNAIRE, APPENDIX 3 AND 4) ............................................................. 15
FIGURE 5 THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES TO CENTRALIZE DIGITAL INITIATIVES AMONG THE COES
VS BUS (RESULTS FROM DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ACCELERATION QUESTIONNAIRE, APPENDIX

3 AND 4)................................................................................................................................ 17
FIGURE 6 COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE VIA DIGITIZED CUSTOMER JOURNEY (RESULTS FROM DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION ACCELERATION QUESTIONNAIRE, APPENDIX 3 AND 4) ................................. 18
FIGURE 7 THE DIGITAL SKILLS FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW (RESULTS FROM DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION ACCELERATION QUESTIONNAIRE, APPENDIX 3 AND 4) ................................. 21
FIGURE 8 CROSS FUNCTIONAL TEAMS TO TACKLE DIGITAL INITIATIVES (RESULTS FROM DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION ACCELERATION QUESTIONNAIRE, APPENDIX 3 AND 4) ................................. 22
FIGURE 9 DIGITAL STRATEGY MATURITY (ACCORDING TO THE ASSESSMENT DONE BASED ON: BCG,
2020). .................................................................................................................................. 26
FIGURE 10 TECHNOLOGY MATURITY (ACCORDING TO THE ASSESSMENT DONE BASED ON: BCG, 2020).
27
FIGURE 11 OPERATIONS MATURITY (ACCORDING TO THE ASSESSMENT DONE BASED ON: BCG, 2020).
28
FIGURE 12 NEW BUSINESSES MATURITY (ACCORDING TO THE ASSESSMENT DONE BASED ON: BCG,
2020). .................................................................................................................................. 29
FIGURE 13. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MATURITY (ACCORDING TO THE ASSESSMENT DONE BASED ON:
BCG, 2020).......................................................................................................................... 30
FIGURE 14. DIGITAL TALENT MATURITY (ACCORDING TO THE ASSESSMENT DONE BASED ON: BCG,
2020). 31
FIGURE 15. DYNAMIC PLATFORM ORGANIZATION MATURITY (ACCORDING TO THE ASSESSMENT DONE
BASED ON: BCG, 2020). ........................................................................................................ 32
FIGURE 16. DIGITAL MATURITY AND BENCHMARK REPORT FOR THE CASE COMPANY (ACCORDING TO
THE ASSESSMENT DONE BASED ON: BCG, 2020). ................................................................... 34
FIGURE 17. DIGITAL BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION SERVICES SCORECARD (FENWICK, 2020). ......... 39
FIGURE 18. SELECTED KNOWLEDGE AREAS FOR EXPLORING IN THIS STUDY. ................................... 40
FIGURE 19. THE BENEFICIAL OUTCOMES OF THE ORGANIZATION’S AGILE TRANSFORMATIONS
(MCKINSEY & COMPANY, 2020). ............................................................................................ 43
FIGURE 20. THE FIVE OPERATING-MODEL DIMENSIONS (MCKINSEY & COMPANY, 2020). ................ 43
FIGURE 21. THE SET OF OUTCOME METRICS BY INDUSTRY (MCKINSEY & COMPANY, 2020). ............ 44
FIGURE 22. OPTIMIZED OPERATIONS PROCESS (FPT DIGITAL, 2022). ........................................... 45
FIGURE 23. SHORTAGE OF DIGITAL TALENT AND ITS IMPACT ON COMPETITIVENESS (BUVAT ET AL.,
2017, P. 6)............................................................................................................................ 48
FIGURE 24. SKILL EVOLUTION FOR THE DIGITAL AGE (SOURCE: CAPGEMINI CONSULTING ANALYSIS).
50
FIGURE 25. DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES, TOOLS AND METHODS CURRENTLY USED BY ORGANIZATIONS
(MCKINSEY & COMPANY, 2018). ............................................................................................ 51
FIGURE 26. WORKFORCE PLANNING AND DIGITAL TALENT DEVELOPMENT BEST PRACTICES (MCKINSEY
& COMPANY, 2018). .............................................................................................................. 52
FIGURE 27. DIGITAL TALENT RANKING RETENTION FACTORS (STRACK ET AL., 2014). ...................... 54
FIGURE 28. SIX AREAS OF CORE DIGITAL TALENT PROFILES (STRACK ET AL., 2017). ...................... 55
FIGURE 29. A STRATEGIC WORKPLACE PLANNING TO REVEAL THE FUTURE GAPS (STRACK ET AL.,
2017). 56
FIGURE 30. DIGITAL CULTURE BARRIERS (GORAN ET AL. 2017). .................................................... 60
FIGURE 31. THREE MAIN AREAS TO FOCUS FOR ACCELERATING THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
(BOOTH ET AL., 2018)............................................................................................................ 61
FIGURE 32. THE FOUR KEY ACTIONS TO CREATE AN OMNI-CONNECTED WORK ENVIRONMENT (SHOOK
ET AL., 2022). ....................................................................................................................... 62
FIGURE 33. THE “NET BETTER OFF” MODEL ADDRESSING THE SIX FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN NEEDS
(SHOOK ET AL., 2022). .......................................................................................................... 63
FIGURE 34. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF THIS THESIS. ............................................................... 66
FIGURE 35. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK PROPOSING THE KEY ELEMENTS OF THE DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION ROADMAP .................................................................................................. 67
FIGURE 36. THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ROADMAP FOR THE CASE COMPANY (INITIAL PROPOSAL)
74
FIGURE 37. THE EVOLUTION FROM CSA FINDINGS TO ELEMENT 1, OPTIMIZED OPERATIONS. .......... 75
FIGURE 38. THE EVOLUTION FROM CSA FINDINGS TO ELEMENT 2, DIGITAL TALENT. ...................... 77
FIGURE 39. THE EVOLUTION FROM CSA FINDINGS TO ELEMENT 3, DYNAMIC ORGANIZATION. ......... 78
FIGURE 40. INITIAL PROPOSAL OF THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ROADMAP CREATED FOR
LEADERSHIP TEAM BY USING CLICKUP TOOL ........................................................................... 80
FIGURE 41. FINAL PROPOSAL OF THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ROADMAP CREATED FOR
LEADERSHIP TEAM BY USING CLICKUP TOOL ........................................................................... 89
 1

1 Introduction

Today, digital transformation is everywhere. A growing number of organizations across

different industries are accelerating their digital transformation not only to make their
operations faster and more efficient, but to meet customer demands in a changing
environment (Deloitte, 2021:4). However, large scale change is hard and digital
transformation “is not just about technology” (Tabrizi, et al. 2019) or increasing efficiency
in the current business. It is about transforming the customer experience and changing
how to operate and deliver value to customer. Moreover, it requires clear targets for each
source of value creation and to make sure the entire company shares one digital vision.

The digital opportunities are evolving faster than the pace of transformation in the
organizations. McKinsey research suggests that the “digital first movers and fast
followers capture more value within their industries than slower-moving companies”,
taking the lead on digital transformation (Booth, et al. 2018). However, the digital
transformation is a journey where the desired destination and the path are different for
every company. From Gartner’s perspective (Gartner, 2021:2), the transformation
journey is taking large organizations at least twice as long and costly than anticipated.
While McKinsey (2018) has found that less than one-third of the organizations
successfully performed their digital transformation. Like on any journey, a careful
planning and a well-organized process should help companies reach the destination
safely and avoid back-roads and unnecessary costs.

This study aims to analyse the opportunities digital transformation can bring to the case
organization and how this can achieve the goals as part of its growth strategy by building
a digital transformation roadmap.

1.1 Business Context

The case organization of this thesis is Huld, a European technology design company
established on February 2020 as a result of the merger between RD Velho and Space
Systems Finland. The company has currently a turnover of EUR 35 million euros and
450 employees working in 12 offices all around in Finland and Central Europe (the Czech
Republic).
 2

Presently, Huld is in a development runaway with leading consultancy players in various

industries. It offers a unique combination of software design solutions and development
services to its customers in a variety of business areas: Machines & Vehicles, Intelligent
Devices, Digital Innovations, Space and Defence. The company’s ambition is to become
one of the leading technology companies in Europe to create meaningful digital solutions
in the not-too-distant future.

1.2 Business Challenge, Objective and Outcome

As a post-merger strategy, starting March 2021, Huld has implemented an organizational

change using the center of excellence (CoE) model to guarantee the company's growth
and development. Building a successful CoE might go through challenges in providing
customized solutions for the business needs at the right time. One major challenge is to
master the digital transformation to accelerate the business.

The objective of this study is to create a roadmap as a strategic plan to accelerate the
digital transformation within Centers of Excellence.

The outcome of this study is the roadmap for acceleration of digital transformation within
Centers of Excellence in Huld. A digital transformation roadmap will plan out Huld’s
digital strategy for 1-2 year into the future and provide a baseline for other organizations
willing to adopt digital transformation as part of their strategy. The roadmap will allow the
case organization to take the right steps to overcome the barriers to digital
transformation, imagine the future and continuously innovate to stay ahead of changes.

1.3 Thesis Outline

The scope of this thesis is to create a roadmap for accelerating the digital transformation
towards achieving Huld’s vision of future state. This will help Huld better understand the
path its business is on, where to focus the efforts and how to overcome the roadblocks
of digital transformation.

The thesis uses Applied action research approach linked with a real business problem
and qualitative research methods to identify key drivers that will be important to take into
consideration in the building of the digital transformation roadmap. The data collection
derives from the stakeholders’ feedback and interviews within the case organization. The
 3

collected data will provide the accurate insights to acknowledge the current challenges
and identify the targets. Thus, this thesis focuses on finding the existing barriers and
defining the major steps in accelerating the digital transformation.

The thesis is organized in seven sections. Section 1 is the Introduction providing

background information about the case company and describing the business challenge,
objective, and the outcome of this study. Section 2 explains and justifies the research
approach and data collection methods involved in this study. Section 3 provides the
results of the current state analysis of the digital transformation, the existing barriers, and
visions for future solutions. Section 4 focuses on finding the relevant existing knowledge
from literature and business industry best practice. Section 5 contains the proposal of
the digital transformation roadmap for case company. Section 6 reports on the validation
of the proposal with the key stakeholders and the final proposal after their evaluation.
Finally, Section 7 summarizes the findings, managerial implications, thesis evaluation
and contribution to the case company.

1.4 Key Concepts

Here is a list of some key terms definitions that are used in this research.

BCG’s Digital Acceleration Index (DAI) is a diagnostic tool that assesses the
company’s digital maturity across seven dimensions: (1) the business strategy driven by
digital, (2) data and technology, (3) operations, (4) customer experience, (5) new digital
services and business models, (6) digital talent and (7) dynamic organization. (BCG,
2020).

Digital maturity is a “key predictor of success for companies launching a digital

transformation”. (BCG, 2020).

Digital Transformation (DT or DX) is the “adoption of digital technology” by a company

“to improve business processes, value for customers and innovation”. (Shaban, 2022).

Digitalization refers to using “digital technologies to change a business model and

provide new revenue and value producing opportunities”. (Gartner, 2022).
 4

2 Method and Material

This section describes the methods used to undertake the research. First, the research
method is described in depth covering the chosen research approach to solve the
problem. Second, the research design is presented including the key elements of the
Thesis and the steps to reach the proposal. Next, the data collection and analysis
techniques are provided, gathering and processing different types of data to build the
optimal solution.

2.1 Research Approach

The research approaches are the methods and procedures that comprise the steps from
broad assumptions to detailed methods of data collection, analysis and interpretation.
(Creswell et al., 2018: 40).

First, a research approach can either be applied (or action) or basic, depending on the
purpose or utility. The applied research aims at finding a solution for an immediate
problem not just gathering knowledge as aimed by the basic research (Kothari 2004: 3-
8). It combines the research and development in a cyclic process which typically relates
to continuous enhancement and organization improvements (Kananen, 2013: 20).

Second, the choice of a research method is made between, qualitative and quantitative
methods. Quantitative research methods are used for statistical or numerical analysis of
data collected through survey and questionnaires. The qualitative research methods are
focused on collecting and analysing non-numerical data to understand a phenomenon,
its structure, factors and causal interrelationship between them (Kananen, 2013: 31). In
qualitative research, the researcher aims to establish the meaning of phenomenon from
the view of participants (Creswell et al. 2018: 54). However, qualitative methods for data
collection and analysis often involve observations, focus groups, content analysis using
questionnaires or structured interviews for data collection. Qualitative research is
commonly conducted on one or selected number of individuals or other units of analysis
who have all experienced the phenomenon (Creswell et al., 2018: 50).

The study itself starts with the analysis of data collection from conducting surveys and
interviews with the organization stakeholders. Therefore, a qualitative research method
 5

is used for identifying the existing barriers and visions to problem solving. The study also
analyses the existing literature and best practices in business in order to find ideas for
the problem solution. Furthermore, the Applied action research (Kananen 2013: 20-23)
is adopted through the application of theory into practice to address specific processes
or business situation, conducted to solve a real business problem.

The design research combines the development and research producing practical
solutions for the organization. Using the applied action research, the thesis aims to
improve the knowledge about certain problem and does not have the goal to implement
this knowledge.

To summarize, this thesis utilizes the Applied action research along with qualitative
research method, gathering qualitative data via interviews, articles, blogs and other
online channels analysis, and questionnaires to find the best-fit solution to an
organization business problem.
 6

2.2 Research Design

This study is planned to be conducted according to the Applied action research design
as illustrated in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1 Research design of this study.

 7

As seen from Figure 1, the study contains five phases. The first phase is setting the
objective. The second phase consists of the current state analysis. The current state
analysis focuses on identifying the digital transformation maturity stage, the existing
barriers of digital transformation and benefits of its acceleration. Moreover, it presents
the analysis of existing visions for future solutions. The data collection (Data 1) is based
on the collected digital maturity surveys, participant observations, and interviews with
organization´s stakeholders, gathering opinions from individual experts and key
stakeholders. The responses will provide insights into the state of the digital
transformation, give a general understanding of where the organization is now and
looking into the future, attempting to visualize where it needs to be in two or three years
from now.

Next, the third phase is focused on available literature and best practice. Literature and
best practice search aim at identifying the selected relevant concepts, tools, theory, and
best practice elements that could help to shape the roadmap for digital transformation
based on existing knowledge.

The next phase is building the initial proposal. In this phase, the proposal is built based
on the second data collection point (Data 2) that involves internal interviews and
discussions as well as the outcomes from current state analysis and conceptual
framework (from the fourth phase).

Finally, the proposal is validated with the executive and top management. First part of
the validation is to use it in practice as a short- and long-term action plan at the case
company. Second validation is done by presenting the proposal to all key stakeholders
to assess it and get their feedback (Data 3). Based on these findings, recommendations
for putting the roadmap into practice will be suggested (in Section 6.3).

2.3 Data Collection and Analysis

This study explores a variety of data sources, and the data was collected in three rounds.
Table 1 provides details of Data collections 1-3 used in this study.
 8

Table 1. Details of Data collections 1-3 used in this study.

2.DATA 3.
1. TOPIC, 4. DATE,
SOURCES, PARTICIPANT, 5.OUTCOME
DESCRIPTION LENGTH
DATA TYPE ROLE

Questionnaire /
Business Units & Written results:
survey with
Customer Sales MARCH / Customer hidden
Business Units
needs analysis stakeholders (14 APRIL 2022 needs &
& Sales
respondents) expectations
stakeholders

Top Management
(6 C-level Field notes,
Strengths &
Surveys with executive Presentation
Weaknesses of
internal respondents), MARCH / slides: Barriers
DATA 1 current
stakeholder / Center of APRIL 2022 and visions to
for Current capabilities and
interviews Excellence digital
state analysis value creation
Directors transformation
(3 respondents)

Strengths &
Head of Filed notes,
Weaknesses of
Operations written results:
current
Interviews / Team leaders, MAY/ JUNE Barriers and
capabilities and
Questionnaire Competence 2022 visions to digital
adoption of
technical leads transformation,
digital
(10 respondents) written results
technology

Embedded
Solutions Center
of Excellence Presentation
Defining Director, slides, field notes:
DATA 2 AUGUST/
Roadmap Workshop/ Head of Initial proposal for
for Building SEPTEMBER
elements Teams meeting Operations, Team the digital
the Proposal 2022
leaders, transformation
Competence roadmap
technical leads
(10-15)

Center of
DATA 3 Presentation
Excellence
for Evaluation slides, field notes:
Validation, Group Directors, Team OCTOBER /
of Final proposal for
evaluation of interview/ Final leaders, NOVEMBER
the Proposal the digital
the Proposal presentation Competence 2022
(via transformation
leads (10-15)
Validation) roadmap
 9

As shown in Table 1, data in this research was gathered and analysed in three rounds.
The first round of data collection was organized in the current state analysis phase. Data
1 was collected from the interviews and questionnaires conducted among three groups
of stakeholders. The first group consists of 9 top management respondents that took a
first questionnaire, then the second group includes 14 respondents from Business Units
& Sales that better understand the customer’s needs and the third group includes 10
competence leads and team leaders from COEs. The first group took the questionnaire
presented in Appendix 1, while the second and the third groups took the questionnaires
presented in Appendix 3 and 4.

In the second round, the suggestions from the Center of Excellence leaders were
gathered into Data 2 and analysed to define the roadmap items and requirements. This
data included interviews, workshops, and one-to-one meetings.

In the third round, Data 3 was collected when performing the validation of the initial
proposal. Data 3 consisted in the recommendations provided by the engaged key
stakeholders.

In this research, the interviews and workshops made the primary methods of data
collection. The interviews were conducted face-to-face at the company premises or
online using interviews questionnaire forms. The responses to the questionnaires can be
found in Appendices 2, 3 and 4. The content of collected data was structured and
analyzed using Thematic analysis.

The current state analysis dealt with a large amount of data. The findings derived from
the current state analysis are examined in Section 3 below.
 10

3 Current State Analysis of Digital Transformation

This section describes and assesses the current state of the existing digital
transformation maturity of case company.

3.1 Overview of the Current State Analysis

The focus of the current state analysis was on (1) understanding where the company is
in its digital transformation journey and how the case company embraces the digital
transformation, followed by (2) the analysis of the organization’s digital transformation
maturity to provide actionable insights to identify the digital acceleration index. The digital
acceleration index (DAI) enables company to evaluate and assess its digital strength and
weaknesses to have a better understanding of its state of digital transformation across
multiple aspects of the business. The company will also be able to identify the steps for
improvements over a multi-year period.

The current state analysis followed three steps. First, it described the organization
setting, so that to give extensive background to the current state analysis. Second, the
data collection was conducted; third, the data analysis was conducted, and the key
findings identified. The data analysis was based on BCG digital maturity model (BCG,
2020), a questionnaire-based evaluation of company’s digital maturity across 36 topics
or questions, grouped into seven dimensions and that categorises companies into four
stages of digital maturity: digital starter, digital literate, digital performer, and leader.
Figure 2 below shows the Four Stages of Digital maturity model developed by Boston
Consulting Group (BCG).
 11

Figure 2 4 Stages of the Digital maturity model (BCG, 2020).

Each maturity stage corresponds to a detailed description of what a company should

have in place in terms of business strategy driven by digital, customer experience,
processes, governance, changing ways of working and technology. Table 2 below
shows the stages of digital transformation maturity.
 12

Table 2. Stages of Digital Transformation Maturity (BCG, 2020).

Starter DAI score 0-25 Digital transformation plans are rudimentary and ad hoc.

Literate DAI score 26-50 Digital laggards that have some digital solutions in place with
the current strategic planning.

Performer DAI score 51-75 Centers of Excellence coordinate to use digital capabilities
successfully.

Leader DAI score 76-100 Digital capabilities embedded into all functions, including
innovation and R&D.

The current state analysis ends with a summary of current digital transformation maturity
in the case company, visions and targeted maturity level, customers feedback analysis,
and the summary of key findings from the resulted digital transformation acceleration
index compared to competitors. These results will help identifying the strengths and
weaknesses of the company digital transformation, as well as selected focus areas of
this study.

The data collection used in the current state analysis is based on surveys and interviews
conducted with the selected key stakeholders. The key stakeholders have different roles
in the company and different areas of expertise. They were chosen based on their
responsibilities for the key activities and involvement in the company strategy, business
areas, processes, operations, or center of competency. The research is a combination
of multiple surveys that have been conducted with the case company top management
team leaders and competence leads, as well as interviews with COO and COE Directors.
The survey is a quantitative research method comprised of questionnaires with the
intention of efficient data collection from a set of respondents. The participants are
advised to select the response and level that best represents the current stage of digital
transformation in the organization. The data collection for the current state analysis is
conducted in four steps.

First, a questionnaire with top management is conducted to identify the awareness of

digital transformation opportunities and the digital strategy in place.

Second, an interview with the Chief Operating Officer. The goal with this interview is to
identify the strength and weaknesses of current way of working and capabilities for the
digital services provided to customers in a variety of industries and value creation.
 13

Third, a questionnaire with all team leaders and competence technical leads is
conducted to identify the state of current capabilities and adoption of digital technologies.

Fourth, a questionnaire with all Business Units managers is conducted to identify the
strengths and weaknesses of current business processes and created customer value
through the existing digital transformation. The results of the current state analysis are
presented below.

3.2 Description of the Current Digital Transformation Journey

The description of the current digital transformation journey relies on the BCG survey
that assesses the case company along seven dimensions: (1) the business strategy
driven by digital, (2) data and technology, (3) operations, (4) customer experience, (5)
new digital services and business models, (6) digital talent, (7) dynamic platform
organization that includes organization governance, agile ways of work and digital
transformation accelerator. (Figure 3)

Figure 3 Digital Acceleration Index Dimensions (Source: BCG, 2020).

 14

BCG’s Digital Acceleration Index (DAI) score is based on the responses to the
assessment questionnaire per dimension provided by 9 top-management respondents.
For each of the 36 topics or questions, respondents choose which custom description of
practices or standards best resembles the case company’s current digital maturity. For
all these questions, there was also a 5th option (”Don’t know”) that would allow the
respondent to skip ahead. The average DAI Score from the 9 respondents was 34, which
corresponds to stage 2, placing the case company in the ”Digital Literate” category
according to BCG’s survey.

Investigating how does the case company manage the digital transformation journey,
among all survey participants, 66% indicated that some digital initiatives are managed
across BUs, functions and regions, while 11% consider there are no overarching plan
and no involvement of external stakeholders.

Thus, an integrated overall digital transformation journey has not been defined yet and
a roadmap has not been developed to reach company’s digital ambition.

3.2.1 Business Strategy Driven by Digital

The company’s ambition to be “the boldest technology and design house in the Galaxy”
is understood by all parties (Business Units and Centers of Excellence) and approved
by the leadership team. A global guideline (processes, responsibilities, decision-making)
is established to prioritize digital strategy and monitor the digital initiatives in the Business
Units.

“Everyone of us is part of Huld story. Feeling of being part of community

has gone down as a result of pandemic and organization change. Also,
about 25% of Huldians have started 2021 or 2022. We have house full of
smart, humane and bold people. Involving more people to making Huld a
better place would make a lot of sense.” (COO, June 2022)

As for the digital vision, Figure 4 below shows that 11 out of 24 survey respondents from
BUs and COEs indicated that the case company has a clearly defined digital vision, while
8 respondents disagree or strongly disagree with that.
 15

Figure 4 Digital vision among the COEs vs BUs (Results from Digital Transformation
Acceleration Questionnaire, Appendix 3 and 4)

Figure 4 also indicates that 33,33% from COEs respondents disagree or strongly
disagree with the statement that the case company has a clearly defined digital vision,
while only half of the BUs respondents have the same opinion. These results show how
the perception of digital vision to guide company’s strategy differs among the BUs and
COEs respondents.

The digital strategies coexist in several functions or BUs of the company. Currently, there
are 12 strategic programs, each of them has an owner, action list and targets. Some
digital initiatives are managed across BUs, functions and regions but without a developed
roadmap to reach the digital ambition holistically across BUs and Centers of Excellence.
However, the innovation approach and roadmap across functions are still missing.

3.2.2 Leveraging the Power of Data and Technology

The case company understands the value that data can create, and a structured
collection of use cases is developed but not comprehensive roadmap for implementation
is built. The company has also an organizational structure in place to govern data and
analytics. Data is managed by IT with input from business without existing a fully
 16

functional data organization in a hub-and-spoke operational model covering the entire

organization. As one of the C-level interviewees expressed:

“It is important to somehow identify the tools for customers since they
benefit of the change if we do such digital change.” (COO, June 2022)

The current data platform uses a mix of traditional technologies and analytics are mainly
descriptive and run primarily through packaged BI and database tools. Analytical
resources are disseminated across the organization. The company also has awareness
of major use cases enabled by AI on management level, job profiles (e.g. data scientists);
they are defined with explicit AI and machine learning skills demand. The case company
is active participant on the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem as part of customers’
business. The organization has key role to provide full value of IoT, including safety
analysis, and HW/SW skills aligned with the current technology and implemented use
cases.

Finally, the company also has a digital security program in place, headed by a Chief
Security Officer for the existing business security services. It aligns security demands to
fit customers business needs, neutrally to their industry, company maturity and size.

3.2.3 Operations

The Next Gen Tech operating model and resources started getting aligned to business
needs building expertise.

Digital delivery (DevOps) for development within the customer projects has clear
ownership with clear continuous development processes for all stages of the software
development life cycle. Majority of respondents answered to DAI survey that outdated
systems are getting replaced and first steps are taken to optimize the core service
processes. As for the digital technologies deployed across the organization, the
respondents to DAI survey are seeing low degree of digitization for strategic processes,
such as decision-making and there is no advanced analytics approach for decision
support. As one of the C-level interviewees expressed:

“We have tons of data and a lot of tools, we are doing pretty much digital,
but when we got to the decision making and how to do things, it becomes
 17

important to do it more systematic and extend the digitalization.” (COO,

June 2022)

The need of a systematic decision-making approach to optimize the core service

processes and faster respond to changing customer demands is indicated in Figure 5
below.

Figure 5 The decision-making processes to centralize digital initiatives among the COEs vs
BUs (Results from Digital Transformation Acceleration Questionnaire, Appendix 3 and 4)

As seen in Figure 5, 10 out of 24 respondents appreciated that the case company’s

processes are efficient, while 5 respondents disagree and 6 neither agree nor disagree
with this statement. Furthermore, 35,72% of BUs respondents are more neutral than the
COEs respondents from that only 22,24% are not having strong thoughts about the
efficiency of case company’s processes.

The case company exploits the benefits of some process automation in reporting the
working hours and invoices, but there are not highly automated with intelligent digital
solutions in place for all operations planning. Presently, customer experience is not
leveraged as input for feedback loop into processes. Furthermore, the interviewed key
stakeholders consider that there is a low degree of digitalization in front and back-office
processes and many tasks remain heavily manual.
 18

3.2.4 Personalized Customer Experience

The organization’s agile development processes and data are integrated to support
customer’s digital processes and improve the research and product (R&D) development.
It runs projects to speed up R&D (e.g. 3D printing, Additive Manufacturing) building
capabilities to become more innovative.
Today, customers expect personalized content in relation to their business, their digital
journey dictating the service provider strategy. Figure 6 below indicates that 13 out of 24
respondents agree or strongly agree with the statement that the case company strives
for a competitive advantage via digitized customer journey.

Figure 6 Competitive advantage via digitized customer journey (Results from Digital
Transformation Acceleration Questionnaire, Appendix 3 and 4)

At the same time, 7 respondents disagree, while 4 neither agree not disagree with the
statement that the customer experience brings competitive advantage and create value
for the case company.

The BUs communicate and engage with customers, both online and offline, to act
positively towards their business. The case company can deliver tailored experiences,
but it is currently missing full analytic capabilities to support personalized experience to
customers at scale. However, the company does not currently have a long-term strategy
and a roadmap for it in place. The CRM data is not yet exploited to the full potential.
 19

Overall stronger focus on processes rather than sales improvements by using digital
technologies and analytics. As one of the sales managers expressed:

“We only communicate by email and phone calls; there is no digital

customer experience in the modern technology.” (Sales manager, May
2022)

On the positive side, the company understands the customer (pain points and unmet
needs) and work together in identifying new opportunities to reinvent customer journey
and deliver differentiated customer experiences.

3.2.5 New Digital Services and Business Models

The case company is disrupting the business model and identifying new businesses on
its way to profitability. The company started to complement its core offerings with digital
services and started to foster digital innovation, identify opportunities, and white spaces
to offer new digital services. An M&A strategy is defined by identifying interesting merger
or acquisition opportunities and running the process to possible agreements. As the
company CEO publicly expressed in the news media about the most recent acquisition:

“Our service selections complement each other perfectly. Now, we will be

able to cover the needs of our customers even better.” (CEO of Huld)

The company successfully delivers digital solutions and can say it is a key player in this
digital services community. As it more and more aligns on strategic goals across the
digital ecosystems, the customer value proposition is refined. Not all its customers are
targeted yet, so the company pushes for broader adoption and promote and
communicate own vision to customers.

3.2.6 Digital Talent

The organization has team leaders appointed and incentivized to make quick decisions,
take risks, and experiment. The mindset of the organization has started adapting towards
digital, e.g. developing the required skills across the organization, building new
capabilities, hiring digital talents and retaining the specialists.
 20

The case company has a dedicated people strategy to attract and onboard digital talent,
based on a good executive guidance. Besides, the company is still struggling to retain
specialists. As one of the C-level interviewees recognized:

“It is kind of big challenge how to keep specialists in our company. People
are changing workplaces much more. There are a lot of turbulences, and
one challenge is how to give motivation during such time. No matter how
much salary budget or sauna evening we have or interesting projects,
people still leave.” (COO, June 2022)

It also runs programs to upskill and train the employees. Most employees already have
the digital skills required by customers. As one employee pointed out:

“We at Huld believe that it is important to develop your skills. Education and
learning are a natural part of work and life. That is why we want to
encourage Huldians to learn new things.”

Digital talents are recruited in a dedicated COE, successfully delivering digital projects
with focus on value generation. But the company does not have a strategic workforce
plan. Most of the employees already have the digital skills they need today. Regarding
the upcoming in demand technology skills, Figure 7 shows the most expertise the case
company will need in the next 2-3 years. The results from the second survey, Appendix
3 taken by BUs and Appendix 4 taken by competence leads reveal that the AI (Machine
Learning, Deep Learning), Big Data/ Analytics, Cybersecurity, Cloud programming,
Wireless Technologies (5G, LiFi, etc) will be the most in demand skills in the nearest
future.

In addition to the proposed future skills shown in Figure 7, “Agile methods to innovate
and conceptualize the entities of smart devices and digital services” is suggested by the
respondents to the survey provided in Appendix 3. Moreover, the respondents suggest
that the technology skills for the future work depend on the company's strategy.

The goal of this second survey (Appendix 3 and 4) was to hear directly from competence
leads and customer’s main business contacts about the digital skills needs, the impact
of COVID-19 pandemic on the workplace and ideas for training and upskilling.
 21

Figure 7 shows a strongest growth of the AI, Big Data analytics and Wireless technology
demand in the next 2-3 years compared to today’s digital skills.

Figure 7 The digital skills for today and tomorrow (Results from Digital Transformation
Acceleration Questionnaire, Appendix 3 and 4)

Through these survey results, the case company better understands the specific digital
skills that are needed and provide recommendations on the tools and training that can
help its businesses better prepare for the future. Thus, the company needs to base its
actions on a clear digital strategy or long-term workforce plan in terms of attracting,
recruiting, and especially retaining digital talent.

3.2.7 Dynamic Platform Organization

The company has a central or hybrid organization with Centers of Excellence in BUs and
functions in place sharing cross departmental topics. Digital is fostered by central
governance, and the company also has KPIs in place to measure progress in digital.
However, currently there is no Chief Digital Officer (CDO) assigned, neither centrally nor
in the BUs/ functions.

The organization has a few teams that experimented the agile ways of working, but there
is no agile culture rolling out across the organization. As one of the C-level interviewees
expressed:
 22

“Work is changing in many aspects, to adapt to change we need to be agile.

What we have done well in the latest 10 years, might not work the same in
the future.” (COO, June 2022)

An agile organization should be able to adapt and react quickly to changing the
organizational culture, mindset of employees. It also empowers the cross functional
teams to tackle the digital initiatives. Figure 8 below indicates the cross-functional
collaboration across the organization.

Figure 8 Cross functional teams to tackle digital initiatives (Results from Digital
Transformation Acceleration Questionnaire, Appendix 3 and 4)

The survey’s results shown in Figure 8 indicate that the respondents from COEs have
more insights into the organization culture, therefore 38,91% of them agree with the
statement that the case company has setup cross functional team, while only 28,57% of
the respondents from BUs have the same level of agreement. The 28,56 % “neither
agree nor disagree” responses from BU’s respondents indicates that they do not have a
strong opinion about whether the company develops new ways of working together to
achieve common goals.

The results from the Digital Acceleration Index survey (Appendix 2) show that some
digital initiatives are managed across the BUs but the company does not have a digital
roadmap developed to reach its digital ambition and strongly engage all stakeholders
 23

from BUs and COEs. The average of the Digital Acceleration Index from all 9
respondents was 34, i.e. 16 points below benchmark. This means the company
succeeded fairly well in defining the company ambitions and strategy content, but when
analysing the survey’s results and interviews, the biggest issue is that the digital
initiatives are executed in functional silos, blocking the transformation and slow digital
acceleration in three primary areas: optimized operations, agile culture and new way of
working and digital talents to create digital experiences at scale.

For most of digital services companies, the COVID-19 crisis has had an “all-or-nothing
effect” on their digital strategy agenda. A Deloitte survey (Kane et al. 2020) found out
that 77% of CEOs reported that the pandemic had sped up their company’s digital
transformation plans or even their company has experienced years of digital
transformation in the span of a few months. The company case is situated through those
companies for that the crisis has accelerated the digitization in terms of way of working
and do business. As one of the C-level interviewees responded to the question if the
COVID-19 pandemic has any impact on speeding up case company’s digital
transformation:

“Absolutely! It happened to Huld as well. The COVID-19 pandemic forced

us to move to remote work in a couple of weeks. You cannot do changes
due to technical reasons, but it is a cultural factor.” (COO, June 2022)

This interview results show that digitization is changing the company cultural experience,
not only in terms of new technology, but also in terms of way of working shaping the way
of interaction and foster a work relationship that motivates employees to try and learn
new things.

Summing up, one of the basic challenges revealed in the digital strategy practices relates
to developing a digital culture for the organization and digital vision for the business and
especially for the future operating model. The top management works intensively with
setting up and ensuring a dynamic strategy but concentrating on silo working way and
focusing less on the customer journey and on delivering new, innovative digital
capabilities that will have greater value for both the business and customer. These silos
block the transformation and slow digital acceleration.
 24

These findings are based on the BCG’s survey called Digital Acceleration Index (DAI)
study, a global survey of about 2 300 companies across the same industry that assesses
the company’s digital needs to accelerate its transformation to comprehensive digital
operations.

3.3 Analysis and Findings of the Current Digital Transformation Maturity Analysis

The analysis below was done based on the assessed BCG’s Digital Acceleration Index
(DAI). The Digital Acceleration Index is a key predictor of success for an organization
launching a digital transformation and it helps the organization measure its ability to
create value through digital.

Furthermore, the BCG tool determines the digital maturity level of the organization to
help building a roadmap for the future.

The BCG Digital Acceleration Index was used for the current state analysis of the case
company’s digital maturity. As seen from the above surveys results, the current state of
digital transformation within the case company is steady but not accelerating.

The assessment of the Digital Acceleration Index was done following the logic shown
earlier in Table 2 (in Section 3.1), and the results are summarized in Table 3.

As seen in Table 3 bellow, the final digital acceleration index shows the maturity of the
case company across 7 dimensions: (1) the business strategy driven by digital, (2) data
and technology, (3) operations, (4) customer experience, (5) new digital services and
business models, (6) digital talent, and (7) dynamic platform organization.

The results of assessing the digital acceleration index for the case company are
summarized in Table 3 below.
 25

Table 3. Digital Transformation Acceleration Index (BCG’s DAI survey results)

Dimension Score Digital Transformation

Maturity stage

1 Business Strategy Driven by Digital 50 Literate

2 Leveraging the Power of Data and Technology: Literate

Data & AI 20

Modular Technology 44

3 Operations 27 Literate

4 Personalized Customer Experience 29 Literate

5 New Digital Services and Business Models 33 Literate

6 Digital Talent 50 Literate

7 Dynamic Platform Organization 33 Literate

The results of assessing the digital acceleration index for the case company, as seen in
Table 3, point to the digital transformation maturity stage to be at Stage 2, Digital literate.

More specifically, the organization is a digital “literate” that has some digital solutions in
place with the current strategic planning. Some processes have been digitized and BUs
have already launched digital initiatives, but in functional silos at the case company, and
it fits with the logic identified by BCG (2020) and shown in Figure 2.

3.3.1 Strategy

When assessing the current Strategy according to BCG (2020), the following results
were gained. The organization explores the vision, ambition and priorities topics ranked
as most important and considers them key factors to achieve its digital maturity goals.
Its digital strategy scored at 50, i.e. 7 points below the benchmark services industry. The
scores are shown in Figure 9 below.
 26

Figure 9 Digital Strategy Maturity (according to the assessment done based on: BCG, 2020).

At the same time, a recognized drawback is that the case company has not yet
developed a digital transformation roadmap, but the results indicate the right course the
company place the digital transformation at the core of its strategy. The trends and
impact of digital were analysed, but the vision is not articulating a digital strategy across
operations. As the key stakeholder expressed it:

“We do not have a digital vision on how the company’s future looks in 2-3
years. But I can say for sure, work is changing, new generation of workers
are coming to work. We should be more agile.” (COO, June 2022)

Developing a digital aspiration for the business and especially for the future operating
model would allow the company to form new work relationship and increase the speed
of decision-making across the organization.

3.3.2 Technology

When assessing the current Technology according to BCG (2020), the next generation
technology including DevOps and IoT scores 44, i.e. 7 points below benchmark. While
 27

Data & AI scores only 20, i.e. 32 below the benchmark services industry. The scores are
shown in Figure 10 below.

Figure 10 Technology Maturity (according to the assessment done based on: BCG, 2020).

Thus, the organization has started experimenting with proof of concepts (POCs), but a
data strategy is not part of the top-management agenda. DevOps and continuous-
development principles for IT development and operations. Projects teams are using
code repositories, and processes are similar for all stages of the software development
life cycle except for deployment. With a strong DevOps culture, the company uses the
new technology in conjunction with the processes and people to change business
performance.

3.3.3 Operations

The organization operations including relevant processes (service operations, corporate

center, shared services and centers of excellence) score 27, i.e. 14 points below
benchmark. (Figure 11)
 28

Figure 11 Operations Maturity (according to the assessment done based on: BCG, 2020).

The organization has many manual activities in most of the processes, e.g. production
scheduling, forecasting and data is likewise fragmented and often missing or not valid.
Furthermore, the processes including administrative tasks are not fully automated. Only
CRM tool and business analytics are used with limited capabilities. This customer
experience is not leveraged as input for feedback loop into processes.

3.3.4 New Growth

The opportunities for new businesses scores 33, i.e. with 18 points below the benchmark.
(Figure 12)
 29

Figure 12 New Businesses Maturity (according to the assessment done based on: BCG, 2020).

The case company has started to complement its core offering with digital services and
to experiment with customer-led innovation identifying not really structured but ad-hoc
new value pools. Less than half of the respondents recognized that the company started
to define a value proposition and which customers to target via a digital ecosystem.
Moreover, the company formed partnerships but not yet a digital ecosystem community
and aligned sporadically its own strategic goals with some partners. As for the value
captured and the business coming from disruptive digital organizations, the respondents
are split into two different opinions: (1) the company is benchmarking its competitors but
has no relationships and not investing yet in any disruptive organizations and (2) the
company has successfully launched disruptive businesses and joint ventures. However,
the case company an M&A strategy defined. It plans to continuously grow and launch
such strategy and to scale up.
 30

3.3.5 Customer Experience

The personalized customer experience scores 29, with 22 points below the benchmark.
(Figure 13)

Figure 13. Customer Experience Maturity (according to the assessment done based on: BCG,
2020).

The company keeps engaged with the customer through its Business Units, swiping
changes in customer expectations regarding the products and services.

The top management were unanimous in their responses when answering to the
question how they run a digital marketing operating model and target the customers via
digital channels. Their response was that the company has focused on the touchpoints
that matter along the customer decision journey, but they do not feel it is able to
effectively track and optimize its execution and ROI. Moreover, the company has digital
marketing experts locally but siloed next to “traditional” marketers and has started
experimenting with data-driven customer personalization.
 31

Currently the company is evaluating scenarios on how to improve the customer

experience. It did not start yet to develop measures along the customer journey to track
satisfaction.

3.3.6 Digital Talent

The digital talent, including leadership and culture as well as people’s skills, scores 50,
i.e. with 2 points below the benchmark. (Figure 14)

When asking top management if a digital is institutionalized through leaders and

cascaded throughout the whole organization to foster a cultural change, the responses
are also split into two different opinions: (1) there are no dedicated leaders to manage or
drive digital initiatives and (2) the organization onboards digital talents into new roles and
has started to adapt towards digital working collaboratively under a good executive
guidance.

Figure 14. Digital Talent Maturity (according to the assessment done based on: BCG, 2020).

Therefore, a redefining of organization leadership mindset, talent and capabilities for the
new digital world is always needed to achieve long-term digital transformation for various
industries.
 32

3.3.7 Dynamic Platform Organization

The dynamic platform organization, including organizational governance, agile at scale

and digital transformation accelerator, scores 33, i.e. with 17 points below the
benchmark. (Figure 15).

Figure 15. Dynamic Platform Organization Maturity (according to the assessment done based
on: BCG, 2020).

According to the digital acceleration index survey, respondents said digital is still
executed decentralized and there is no decision to push digital across BUs and functions.
Furthermore, the company experiments with agile ways of working but there is no agile
culture rolled out across businesses and IT to deliver measurable business value and
the organizational, governance and technology agility enablers are not addressed.

According to a senior lead, an agile management of working can implant the values of
knowledge sharing among the employees, in which knowledge about tools, culture,
libraries, development environment settings or best practices can be shared. As the
senior lead pointed out:
 33

“I had to setup a test environment for one project and spend some time on
that. But similar configuration or libraries might be already done in other
project in the company. Having the ready-made solution with the existing
libraries, methods from other colleagues would help saving the hours spent
for developing the solution from scratch.”

Therefore, the employees and company can benefit of knowledge sharing because it
helps the employees and organization’s business to be more agile and adaptable to the
changes.
Next sub-section provides an overview of the main strengths and weaknesses identified
in the current state analysis.

3.4 Summary of the Current State Analysis Results

This section summarizes the results of the current state analysis pointing to the main
strengths and weaknesses identified in the evaluation process of the company’s digital
maturity across the major 7 dimensions and discussions with the key stakeholders.

Figure 16 summarizes the results from the questionnaire conducted with the
stakeholders based on Digital Acceleration Index (DAI) tool (BCG, 2020).
 34

Figure 16. Digital Maturity and Benchmark Report for the Case Company (according to the
assessment done based on: BCG, 2020).

The DAI scores by dimension, as seen in Figure 16, reflect major differences in the
assessment of digital maturity among all 7 dimensions. Standing above the rest, the
Strategy Driven by Digital dimension scored 50 points, the highest average score. This
score suggests that a significant number of top managers acknowledge the importance
of digital transformation and need of a detailed plan to achieve it successfully. Moreover,
the Strategy Driven by Digital was only 7 points below the benchmark, but still far below
its own target of 92 points.

The Operations, Personalized customer experiences and the New offers, services and
business models drive to Outcomes. The Outcomes DAI assessed the marketing and
customer offers, operations, support functions, new digital growth, people and digital
ecosystem. The case company has Operations DAI score of 27 points, that revels a low
degree of digitization in front and back-office processes. Thus, in terms of systematic
 35

operating model the case company is below the benchmarking with 14 points that reflects
compared toother companies in the same industry the operating model is not enough
agile or adapted to the new capabilities. The top management participants to DAI survey
considers the company is focusing on the touchpoints along customer decision journey
but do not feel that it is able to effectively track and optimize its execution and ROI.
Missing direct personalized relationships with the significant customers positions the
case company with 37 points far below the benchmark as seen in Figure 16. Pursuing
new digital growth, the case company scored 29 points, i.e. with 22 points below
benchmark, with the expectation that its digitization efforts will bring greater growth and
enable it to launch new services.

The DAI research on the Human investment divided into Dynamic Platform Organization
and Digital talent, shows that the case company understands that introducing new ways
of working is critical. This is evidenced by a DAI score of 33 points in the Dynamic
Platform Organization assessment, i.e. with 17 points below the benchmark and 50
points in the Digital talent assessment, i.e. only 2 points below the benchmark (Figure
16). This benchmarking reflects that majority of the companies in the same digital
services industry plan to upskill more in the coming years.

In digital transformation, the Technology is essential to unleashing human creativity and

exploiting opportunities. Thus, the case company has started experimenting with use
cases and proof of concepts, but without implemented a structured pan to realize this
value. The DAI survey results show that the next generation technology including
DevOps and IoT scores 44, i.e. 7 points below benchmark, while Data & AI scores only
20, i.e. 32 below the benchmark services industry. (Figure 16). The Data & AI benchmark
result shows that the other companies in the same industry are well advanced in terms
of digital maturity. The COVID-19 pandemic has definitely increased the need for use of
the digital services as well improving their efficiency significantly from 2019 through
2021.

Overall, the case company is still behind the benchmark in terms of digital maturity. The
benchmarking is comparing companies from 27 countries from Europe, Asia and the US,
ranking each company’s digital transformation acceleration on a scale from 0 to 100 as
described in Figure 2, the 4 stages of digital maturity defined by the BCG’s Digital
Acceleration Index (DAI). Companies with a DAI score from 76 to 100 qualify as a digital
leader that has a well-defined digital strategy and roadmap to execute the digital vision.
 36

Those with a score from 51 to 75 are digital performers building digital proficiency and
coordinate the capabilities successfully through Centers of Excellence. Then those with
a score of 50 or less are digital literates that are aware about digital systems as an
opportunity to speed up and optimize the operations as well as changing the way of
working through an agile digital culture. And those with a score of 25 and less are digital
starters that experiments some rudimentary and ad-hoc digital transformation plans.

Next sub-sections cover the strengths and weaknesses found out during the analysis of
Data 1 collection and chosen key areas to focus the Centers of Excellence can focus on
and find improvements to accelerate the digital transformation of the case company.

3.4.1 Strengths and Weaknesses

Based on the above key findings, the strengths and weaknesses identified during the
analysis of Data collection1 can be formulated for the company’s digital transformation
journey as follows.

First, the organization has highly skilled and innovative digital talents.

Second, the company is continuously identifying new opportunities to reinvent customer

journey.

Third, the company has a dedicated people strategy to attract and onboard digital talents
based on a good executive guidance.

Fourth, the COEs are successfully delivering digital projects with focus on value
generation.

In addition to the identified strengths, the weaknesses also gave clear understanding of
the roadblocks that are impeding the acceleration of digital transformation in the case
company. The following weaknesses were also identified in the current state analysis
based on the results from the surveys and discussions with the key stakeholders.

First, as for the digital technologies deployed across the organization, there is a low
degree of digitization for strategic processes, such as decision-making and there is no
advanced digital analytics approach for a more systematic decision support.
 37

Second, in terms of digital talent, the company does not have a holistic resourcing plan
in terms of attracting, recruiting, onboarding and especially retaining digital talent and it
has not yet developed a roadmap to reach the digital ambition and customer future
expectations on the future digital skills.

Third, in terms dynamic organization, the company does not have an agile culture rolled
out across BUs and Centers of Excellence to drive digital transformation and to deliver
measurable business value.

Table 4 below summarizes the strengths and weaknesses for the company’s existing
digital transformation stage.

Table 4. Strengths and weaknesses for the case company during the analysis of Data
collection 1.

STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES

The organization has highly skilled Operations: Low degree of digitization for
talents decision-making process.

The company is continuously identifying Digital talent: The company does not have a
new opportunities to reinvent services holistic resourcing plan and a roadmap in
provided to customers. place to rapidly changing customer
expectations.

The company has dedicated people Dynamic platform organization: The

strategy to attract and onboard digital company does not have an agile culture
talent, based on a good executive rolled out to drive digital transformation.
guidance.

Next sub-section provides the selected focus areas identified in the current state
analysis.

3.4.2 Selected Focus Areas

The key findings point to, first, the strengths and the weaknesses of the current digital
transformation journey in the case company and, second, to the most relevant domain
impacting the case company digital journey.
 38

The analysis of the digital maturity of the case company reviled (1) the operations
optimization key factor as a systematic digital approach in decision making to improve
the quality of work and ensure customer satisfaction, (2) the key digital talent factor that
enhances the changes to digital transformation to succeed points to building capabilities
for the workforce of the future and (3) the key to creating a dynamic organization lies in
creating an agile culture and new ways of working.

The same areas were pointed out by the key stakeholders as necessary building block
for the roadmap to reach the digital ambition holistically across the Centers of Excellence
and summarized in Table 5 below.

Table 5. Selected focus areas for accelerating the digital transformation via building a roadmap
for the case company.

DIMENSION

1 Operations Optimization (Implementing a systematic digital approach in decision

making)

2 Digital Talent (Building capabilities for the workforce of the future)

2 Dynamic Organization (Creating an agile culture & way of working)

These selected areas for accelerating the digital transformation will be dealt with in the
following sections in order to build a functional roadmap for the case company. In the
following Section 4, available literature and best practice for creating a roadmap to digital
transformation is explored to identify relevant guidance for building such a roadmap later
in Section 5.
 39

4 Existing Knowledge and Best Practice for Creating a Roadmap to

Digital Transformation

This section discusses the best practices from the available business literature, articles
and white papers. The previous Section 3 focused on the current state analysis of the
case company identifying the main areas to focus on for building the digital
transformation roadmap.

In the evaluation of digital business transformation services providers, Fenwick (2020)

provides a comparative assessment of top organizations in the market and classifies
them as leaders, strong performers, contenders, and challengers, based on a digital
transformation scorecard model. Figure 17 below highlights Accenture, Boston
Consulting Group (BCG) and McKinsey as leaders in accelerating digital transformation
across their organization as well helping clients build new digital business capabilities.

Figure 17. Digital Business Transformation Services Scorecard (Fenwick, 2020).

 40

These organization leaders stand for bringing best practices to the case company in
rapidly building strong digital business strategy capabilities, improving the strategic
workforce planning to better deliver relevant business outcomes to customers with fast
payback and understand how to layer new technology into a dynamic organizational and
operational transformation.

The next sub-sections cover the case company’s main three challenge areas to deal with
as identified in Section 3. These three challenge areas are as follows: 1) Operations
Optimization, 2) Digital talent, 3) Dynamic organization.

4.1 Selected Knowledge Areas for this Thesis

In this thesis, the three challenge areas were selected for exploring the available
knowledge and best practices, as shown in Figure 18.

Dynamic Optimized
organization Operations
Digital
transformation

Digital Talent

Figure 18. Selected knowledge areas for exploring in this study.

These three knowledge areas (Operations, Digital Talent and Dynamic Organization)
were chosen to support the core theme of this thesis, building a roadmap for digital
transformation. The First element is Optimized Operations, and it enables the
 41

infrastructure modernization for a systematic digital approach through that the digital
transformation can improve organizational effectiveness and efficiency. Second element
is Digital Talent, which enables building a talent strategy for digital transformation
focusing on retaining specialists and upskilling. The Third element is Dynamic
organization. A dynamic organization reflects fundamental changes in culture and
leadership style and empowers the way of working, all together driving the digital
transformation.

These areas make parts of the Conceptual framework of this study and exploring them
will provide relevant tools, methods, concepts and ideas for building the roadmap to
digital transformation.

4.2 Element 1: Operations Optimization – Systematic approach in decision making

According to Business Finland and VTT (2018), the growth of business leans on digital
operations as tomorrow’s smart services are created in a new digital ecosystem.
However, understanding what digital transformation means in terms of operations
remains a challenge for several companies staying focused on organization’s changes
modifying its standard operating procedures to include new technologies or use a
structured and more systematic operating model. Beyond these aspects, McKinsey
(2018) sees an increase in data-based decision making and in the visible use of
interactive tools can more than double the success of digital transformation.

4.2.1 Definition of Operations Optimization

Atherton & Associates (2022) defines the operations optimization as “the process of
ensuring that your operations are performing as efficient and effective as possible.”
Furthermore, there are five reasons a company might consider taking a close look in
terms of operations optimizations: 1) improving the quality of work, 2) ensuring the
efficiency in the long run, 3) assisting business in complying with regulations, 4) tracking
the employees’ performance, 5) ensuring accurate information.
 42

4.2.2 Operations Optimization Features and Benefits for the Digital Transformation

An important pillar of digital transformation is optimizing the operations, simplifying, and

rationalizing existing processes.

According to Atherton & Associates (2022), the operations optimization improves the
quality of work through refining processes that can mitigate costly errors and ensure
customers satisfactions. The efficiency is a natural outcome of an optimized process,
seeing as part of the process to get more productive in the long run and keep track of
resources or monitoring ROI (Return of Investment). Since the industry or general data
protection regulations are constantly changing, the optimization of processes can assist
the business in complying with regulations. An automated and optimized process can
ensure easiest monitoring and faster for top management to obtain the information. An
automated system can drastically reduce the risk from human errors and data loss and
improve data monitoring to keep top management informed about employees’
performance or other changes so they can make decision immediately when it counts.
As Atherton & Associates (2022) noted, updated processes lead to updated information.
Improving the communication with a clear-cut flow between BUs and COE, results in
accurate information for employees to perform their jobs well.

Although the beneficial outcomes of implementing optimized operations are widely,

McKinsey & Company (2020) highlights three main outcomes as a result of their
analyses on 22 organizations in six industry sectors: improved customer satisfaction,
employee engagement and operational performance. The achievement of higher level
of these three outcomes produces the improvement of financial performance as seen in
Figure 19.
 43

Figure 19. The beneficial outcomes of the organization’s agile transformations (McKinsey &
Company, 2020).

According to McKinsey & Company (2020), the extent to which an organization has
implemented an agile operating model represents its level of digital transformation
maturity. Figure 20 provides a clear path to the implementation of operating model
across five dimensions.

Figure 20. The Five operating-model dimensions (McKinsey & Company, 2020).

Analyzing the set of outcomes metrics during the implementation of optimized

operations, McKinsey & Company (2020) synthesizes that organizations use a unique
set of metrics depending on their industry sectors, customer type and transformation
objectives (Figure 21).
 44

Figure 21. The set of outcome metrics by industry (McKinsey & Company, 2020).

However, the organizations that need to attract and recruit new talent focused more on
the employee engagement, while those in financial need focused on financial
improvement and those struggling competitive pressure concentrated on customer
satisfaction.

The optimized operations process is considered by FPT Digital (2022) as a “key factor
in the digital transformation of businesses”. Furthermore, it pointed out that the optimized
operations bring the following benefits to the company’s businesses: minimizing
operational costs, ensuring effective resource allocation, and achieving operational
efficiency. The features required by an efficient operation process are depicted in Figure
22.
 45

Figure 22. Optimized Operations Process (FPT Digital, 2022).

Thus, starting the optimization of company’s operation process, the following stages
might be identified: 1) provides real-time reliable data for operating activities, 2) ensure
smooth coordination among BUs and COE in the business, 3) utilizes optimally
operational resources, 4) facilitates the participation of employees to comply with, 5)
facilitates tracking and making changes as needed for top managers, 6) enhances
transparency in business activities.

Accenture also recognizes that optimizing operations is critical to organizations.

According to Accenture (2020), these operations “must match the organization’s
customer experience (CX) vision and deliver that experience at the pace customers
demand and competitive pressure requires.” Moreover, the operations must synchronize
with the customer experience vision have and work together towards digital acceleration.

For many organizations, the operational transformation for dynamic execution is

challenging, costly and resources demanding. Accenture (2020) identifies three areas
as critical to optimizing operations: 1) making real-time decisions to deliver a superior
customer experience at the speed of digital, 2) integrating all operational activities into a
 46

centralized system to provide visibility into customer experience objectives, and 3)

enabling business relevancy with process automation to effectively compete and remain
relevant to customers.

1) The ability to make real-time decisions is essential to delivering a superior customer

experience to the speed of digital. Accenture (2020) reveals that 52% of business
decision-makers point to horizontal silos between departments as one of the biggest
impediments to operational cooperation. The employees might have a real-time view of
the desired customer experience. This information empowers organization’s people to
inform their leaders about every customer touchpoint in order to make the right decisions.
Having access to relevant customer insights and current conditions, the operations
teams can make real-time changes to drive operational excellence.

2) Integrating all operational activities related to customers into a centralized system is

one of the leader’s priorities in an organization. According to Accenture (2020), 90% of
organizations view the chief marketing officer and executive level managers as the
“connective tissue” between different lines of business to drive unparalleled levels of
collaboration across the entire organization.

3) Automating the operations processes allows organizations to respond quickly to

customer needs. “1/3 of workers globally say a lack of standard processes for workflow
gets in the way of getting work done.” (Accenture, 2020). There are three main benefits
of automating the operations processes: (1) free up resources by removing repetitive,
manual cross-department process tasks; (2) shift people’s focus to continually improving
and innovating; (3) drive the rapid execution of customer experiences ahead of
competitors and in-sync with customer expectations.

Overall, the operational transformational journey within the organizations must address
the employee’s engagement and processes to operationalize the customer experience
within an operating model for driving real-time decision making and enhance
transparency in business activities.

4.2.3 Operations Optimization Analysis

In the daily operations, the benefits of optimized operations process can be seen in its
efficiency in the decision-making process (Accenture, 2020).
 47

First, the optimized operations help to clearly define the nature of decision to make. As
soon as the top managers have access to the needed information created and
maintained by more advanced technologies, the decision making will be more relevant
and consistent.

Second, the optimized operations help gathering relevant information. The top
management has to first collect the needed information before making a decision.

Third, identifying the alternatives. Once the information has been collected, a desirable
list of alternatives as possible paths of actions are identified.

Fourth, evaluating the alternatives is considered the most challenging part in the
decision-making process. Using efficient analysis tools, the top managers would be able
to choose those paths of actions that have the higher potential for reaching their goals.

Fifth, taking a positive action by starting to implement the chosen alternative through the
help of optimized operation process running on the decision making and analysis tool.

Finally, reviewing the decision and its consequences. If the decision has not met the
expected need, the optimized process can allow repeating certain steps of the process
to make a new decision. This can be possible by gathering further detailed or different
information or explore more optimal alternatives.

If summarized, the following changes would have a significant impact on the

organization:

1. Refining the operations process for providing real-time reliable data for operating
activities syncing with customer experience vision. (Atherton & Associates, 2022).

2. Implementing a governance operating model to drive quick and right decision making,
enhance transparency in business activities and ensure a smooth coordination among
BUs and COE in the business. (Accenture, 2020).

3. Utilizing optimally operational resources. (FPT Digital, 2022)

Summing up, typical benefits from the best practices for creating digital optimized
operations can be pulled together to implement a governance model to optimize, simplify,
and rationalize the existing decision-making process.
 48

Next sub-section provides the existing knowledge and best practices for the second
selected focus areas identified in the current state analysis, digital talent.

4.3 Element 2 of the Conceptual Framework – Digital Talent

According to Frankiewicz et al. (2020), contrary to popular belief, the “digital

transformation is less about technology, and more about people.” Thus, the company
can buy any technology, but its ability to adapt to digital future depends on the next
generation of skills, closing the gap between talent resources and customer demand and
proving the digital talent potential.

The awareness of digital talent gap and need for investing in the people who can make
the acquired technology useful, it is the main implication of company’s leaders.

In Buvat et al. (2017), Capgemini Digital Transformation Institute identifies the key trends
and changes in the digital talent gap pointing out that over 54% of the organizations
agreed that the digital talent gap impedes the acceleration of their digital transformation
and that their organization has lost competitive advantage because of a shortage of
digital talent. (Figure 23)

Figure 23. Shortage of digital talent and its impact on competitiveness (Buvat et al., 2017, p. 6).
 49

Besides, as digitalization emerges, it becomes more difficult to find professionals with

the right digital skills and many companies end up delegating these responsibilities to
junior level employees or even to recent graduates.

4.3.1 Definition of Digital talent

The digital talent is defined by Tunc et al. (2020) as the talented employees who are able
to adapt and use the existing digital technologies. Thus, digital talent is someone who
has the needed skills to make things easier. However, the technical skills are not enough.
Digital talent needs to have business acumen that means the ability to understand
business issues, to own the specific knowledge and make a logical to take decision and
gave a positive impact towards achieving the digital vision of the organization.

4.3.2 Description of Digital talent Best practices for a successful Digital Transformation

Capgemini and MIT (2013) research uncovered that 87% of companies feel digital
transformation is a competitive opportunity. However, despite the skills shortage, 46%
have invested in the development of digital skills.

One of the common challenge most of the organizations have faced is how the technical
competence teams and business team speak different languages. The expansion of
digital tools and emerged technologies across functions support the business manager
to learn sufficient technical skills. At the same time, the technical specialist should be
ready to understand the business language in order to be synchronized with their sales,
marketing and product counterparts. As highlighted by Capgemini (2013) consulting
analysis, in the long-term, the need is for an evolved professional who is equally
comfortable with business and technology. (Figure 24)
 50

Figure 24. Skill Evolution for the Digital Age (Source: Capgemini Consulting Analysis).

The results from successful transformation as revealed by McKinsey & Company (2018),
show that the organizations with accelerated digital transformation are more predisposed
than others to use emerged technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, machine-
learning techniques, and the Internet of Things. Thus, organizations with successful
transformation use more emerged technologies than others do.

The digital technologies, tools and methods used by organizations with successful
transformation is shown in Figure 25, below.
 51

Figure 25. Digital Technologies, tools and methods currently used by organizations (McKinsey &
Company, 2018).

Having these technologies (Figure 25) on hand is just one part of the key factors in place
to successful digital transformation. The McKinsey & Company (2018) indicates in Figure
26 the keys to more successful digital transformation.
 52

Figure 26. Workforce planning and digital talent development best practices (Mckinsey &
Company, 2018).

McKinsey & Company (2018) research points out five categories of key factors that might
enhance the changes of a digital transformation to succeed: 1) having experienced digital
leaders, 2) building competences for the “workforce of the future”, 3) adopting new ways
of working, 4) upgrading digital tools, 5) mastering digital communication in the
workplace.

1) Having leaders familiar with digital technologies is one of the keys to successful
transformation. Thus, the transformation’s success is more likely through the leadership
commitment such as the engagement of leaders to focus on transformation initiatives.

2) The McKinsey & Company (2018) research revealed that building the needed
competences through the organization is one of the most important factors to successful
digital transformation. First, redefining the individual roles and responsibilities to align
with the digital vision will help identify the skills needed to be developed by the
organization. Second, engaging the specific roles to identify the potential gaps of the
digital innovation. Third, possessing specialized digital skills, the technical innovation
managers can bring achievements on the company’s digital innovations. Furthermore,
 53

the McKinsey & Company (2018) associates the success of an organization with the
capacity to scale up its workforce in planning and talent development.

3) Digital transformation requires cultural and behavioural taking risks, increasing

collaboration, and customer centricity (McKinsey & Company, 2018). Establishing
practices to support new ways of working that promote a positive culture are the key to
digital transformation success.

4) Digitizing tools and processes support the acceleration of digital transformation. First,
adopting the digital tools that facilitate the access to reliable information across the
organization. Second, implementing digital technologies to enhance self-serving for
employees and business partners. Third, focusing on technology in optimizing
operations, the organization would be able to modify its standard operating procedures
to introduce trending technologies.

5) An effective communication is the base of digital transformation. First key to success

is communicating a change initiative to employees to understand how it may impact their
work and customers, as well as the reason of changing. Second key is team leaders
promoting the changes within their team, BUs and COEs.

According to Strack et al. (2017) analysis on “how to gain and develop digital talent and
skills”, the biggest challenge is not on perceived and invested technology, but the lack of
qualified employees. The study also revealed that the digital talented people are in highly
demand so that many companies have to reinvent themselves to attract experts. Strack
et al. (2017) highlights that only 25% of the people recruited through the online talent
acquisition tools are working today at companies with more than 10 000 employees. The
Strack et al. (2017) response to this challenge is that first, the company should build new
pools of skilled digital employees by starting to find out who these future employees are,
where they can be found and how they can be attracted and retained. Second, the digital
talent for specific company roles come not only from recruiting new employees but also
from developing the personal digital skills. Lastly, working together in interdisciplinary
teams reinforce digital talents to extend the range of their capabilities and create a true
digital culture.

Retaining top digital talent is another challenge for organizations. Strack et al. (2014)
provides compelling evidence emphasizing the power of appreciation at work to
 54

empower digital talent. Figure 27 shows the ranking factors that contribute to building
and retaining the pool of digital talent.

Figure 27. Digital talent ranking retention factors (Strack et al., 2014).

Through the analysis of a large number of recruitment profiles and from several
interviews with digital professionals, Strack et al. (2017) has identified six areas where
digital talent can have the most impact. As shown in Figure 28, these six areas are digital
business models, digital marketing, agile digital development, advanced data analysis,
Industry 4.0 operations and established new ways of working. The analysis also
identified core skill sets for each profile along with sub-profiles, for instance the “robotics
and automation engineer” profile that includes under its umbrella the sub-profiles Test
 55

and automation controls engineer, Automation systems engineer, Robotics software

engineer, and Human-robot interaction architect.

Figure 28. Six Areas of Core Digital talent profiles (Strack et al., 2017).

This analysis helped estimating the required digital talent in terms of the 20 profiles and
review the available digital talent in house to create a model that predict the profiles in
demand and skills gap.

The strategic workforce planning reveals the future gaps (Figure 29) and that it needs to
triple the existing digital talent and train most of the employees in order to achieve its
digital agenda and stay competitive. Thus, a strategic workforce planning helped
company understand its digital talent needs and provide valuable inputs on the demand
for recruitment and development skills to fill the gaps.
 56

Figure 29. A Strategic Workplace Planning to Reveal the Future Gaps (Strack et al., 2017).

Overall, whether an organization has already started a digital transformation that is

adapting to the digital talent mindset, it is important for any company to figure out about
the ways in which digitization could impact the business in the near and longer term and
take important steps to support the digital talent strategy to enhance its opportunities for
a successful transformation.

4.3.3 Digital talent Analysis

An examination of the key factors to digital transformation success, as comprised by

digital talent in the best practices and applicable to the case company challenges in
providing the needed digital services, revealed significant steps to drive its talent strategy
in the digital age.

First, it is vital for companies to have digital geeks leaders to understand the implications
of digital to the career paths of digital talents and the way of working across the
organization.
 57

Second, the leadership commitment such as the engagement of superior executives and
leaders need to be more involved in a digital transformation with active transformation
initiatives and dedicated change effort.

Third, redefining employees’ roles and responsibilities to align with a digital strategy goal
can help identify the capabilities to build the workforce of the future and as demanded
by customers.

Fourth, conducting a skills gap analysis and creating a strategic workforce planning could
enhance companies understanding on their digital talent needs and provide valuable
inputs for recruitment and development skills. McKinsey & Company (2018).

Fifth, focusing on digital talent by investing in their upskilling and reskilling paths to
reduce the impact of talent shortages and to keep pace with customer expectations.
(Strack et al., 2017).

Lastly, using new ways of attracting, recruiting and retaining digital talent to make sure
digital service company recruits for the right set of skills that are in high demand across
customer’s industries and to digitize the entire employee life cycle, from onboarding to
retiring.

To summarize, the following changes would have a significant impact on the

organization:

1. Developing employee accelerated career path and ladders within the organization to
enhance engagement among the digital talents and leaders in the digital transformation
journey with active transformation initiatives and dedicated full time to a change effort.
(McKinsey & Company, 2018)

2. Building digital capabilities for the workforce of the future by investing in upskilling and
reskilling. (Strack et al., 2017)

3. Developing a strategic workforce plan for succeeding in closing the future skills gap,
recruiting, and retaining digital talent. (Strack et al., 2017)

Summing up, all the above measures have a win-win with both digital talent and
organization as they are ensuring employee satisfaction and digitalization moving
forward the digital transformation.
 58

Next sub-section provides the existing knowledge and best practices for the third
selected focus areas identified in the current state analysis, dynamic organization.

4.4 Element 3 of the Conceptual Framework – Dynamic organization

According to Araujo (2014), “the future belongs to the dynamic organization“. The two
main factors that will control which companies turn digital to their advantage the identified
in the agile at scale across the organization and way of working. Agile at scale means
the organization is Agile. Thus, it can develop and deliver measurable business value
quickly supported by the technology agility enablers.

The companies might bring the entire organization along the digital journey by creating
a real digital culture inspiring their employees a deep understanding of the company’s
digital vision.

4.4.1 Definition of Dynamic Organization

A Dynamic Organization as defined by Araujo (2014), it is an organization that has the

capacity to “uniquely combined specific elements of the four foundational organizational
traits to become a responsive, agile and adaptive organization”. Furthermore, the
organizational dynamic is defined in the HumanResourcesMBA (2022) as the process of
continuously reinforcing resources and enhancing employee performance. Besides, it is
also described as the way an organization manages and promotes organizational
learning, better business practices and strategic management.

4.4.2 Description of Dynamic organization Features and Best Practices

According to Araujo (2014), each dynamic organization shares three key attributes: 1)
fast and reactive, 2) flexible and adaptive, and 3) continuously changing.

First, a dynamic organization is able to quickly respond to customer opportunities and

fast innovation of provided services. Second, a dynamic organization is “flexible and
adaptive”. As the customers move faster and faster towards digital, they require not only
being reactive but that digital service companies offer them the flexibility and adaptability
needed to respond rapidly to evolving challenges and opportunities. Third, everything is
 59

changed fast. The organizations have rebranded as the digitization transforms the
customer experience, business operations, therefore the digital transformation strategy
must be holistic and inclusive of all organization’s business segments and functions.

All these factors form together the building capabilities to becoming a dynamic
organization, helping the organization improve and get better, helping transform an
organization into a dynamic organization.

HumanResourcesMBA (2022) revealed that understanding the dynamics of

organizational culture is important to all organizations and leaders within all industry
sectors. Business, human resources, sales or marketing and finance can benefit from
organizational dynamics. Moreover, the development of organizational dynamics places
an emphasis on the people-centric approach to create a culture with high performance
and long-range employee satisfaction. Implementing the practices of organizational
dynamics can resolve conflicts, enhance interpersonal work relationships, implement
successful digital strategy, and assess current organization culture needs.

The key to creating a dynamic organization lies in creating an agile culture and new ways
of working. First, getting teams together in a strategic way that highlights their strengths
would have a positive impact on any business. The work relationship key success and
productivity depend on teams build trust, cross functional collaboration, and
communication. Second, McKinsey & Company (2018) research results suggest that
communicating a change initiative will make employees understand where the
organization is headed, why the change is needed, and why is the change important. “At
the organizations that followed this practice, a successful transformation is more than
three times more likely.” (McKinsey & Company, 2018). Third, Goran et al. (2017)
reported that key decision makers believe that shortcomings in organizational culture are
the most significant barriers to company success in the digital age. Figure 30 below
shows the culture as the significant barrier to digital transformation.
 60

Figure 30. Digital culture barriers (Goran et al. 2017).

The Goran et al. (2017) survey of global executives on organizational culture highlights
three digital-culture barriers: 1) siloed mind-sets, 2) risk aversion and 3) weak customer
focus. Therefore, solving these cultural problems contributes leading the companies
through successful digital transformation. First, the organizational silos are often
characterized as limited in employees’ interactions, acting too slowly because they
separate employees and goals from the rest of the organization. Second, a risk aversion
holds away the business opportunities and slow down responses to quick-changing
customer needs. Third, lacking the understanding of customer vision results in failing to
decide where to place the company’s outcomes to expand customer choice and take the
best actions.

In addition, Booth et al. (2018) found that the organizations can accelerate their digital
transformation by focusing on three main areas: 1) adopting digital ways of working, 2)
attracting and retaining digital talent and 3) modernizing the IT architecture and
enviironment, as ilustrated in Figure 31 below.
 61

Figure 31. Three main areas to focus for accelerating the digital transformation (Booth et al.,
2018).

First, adopting the new ways of working based on agile management methods and
practices, including interactions with employees and customers. Therefore, Booth et
al.(2018) proposes an effective approach to build an in-house “digital factory” dedicated
to producing custom solutions to serve customer’s needs faster. Second, delivering new
customized products will require additional digital talent to tackle more assignments. For
instance, the organizations will need to attract people to succeed as product owners,
designers, DevOps engineers, front-end/full-stack developers, data analytics and
machine-learning engineers, data scientists and other digital specialists. Third, a
necessary step in modernizing the IT architecture is to streamline the organization
operations. A streamlined architecture helps an organization to deliver more services
more effectively to faster decision-making.

Shook et al. (2022) refines the future of work by “creating an environment where people
feel connected to each other, their leaders and work” where they are seen, heard, able
to learn, develop, take new challenges, and advance in their career. This work
environment is called “omni-connected”. Figure 32 below shows the four key actions
identified by Shook et al (2022) to create an omni-connected work environment.
 62

Figure 32. The four key actions to create an omni-connected work environment (Shook et al.,
2022).

The four key actions that enable omni-connected employee experiences focus on (1)
modern leadership based on transparency and trustworthiness, (2) thriving culture that
engages people to expand their skills and grow, (3) agile organization to enable flexibility
and new ways of working to be the most productive, and (4) emerging technologies to
keep people connected and collaborating.

To better understand how and where Accenture’s employees are working after the
COVID-19 pandemic, Shook et al. (2022) conducted a “Care to do better” research
program which reveals that 17% of the employees felt they were benefiting from omni-
connected experience at work. Therefore, Accenture started implementing the future of
work model called “Net Better Off” that enables individuals to work at their full potential
and it uncovers six main human needs that contribute to unlocking the individual’s
potential at work: relational, emotional & mental, physical, financial, purposeful and
employable. The Accenture’s Chief Leadership and HR Officer, Ellyn Shook and
research co-sponsor, David Rodriguez, as cited in Shook et al. (2022), state: “The
pandemic has accelerated what was already in motion: a questioning of relationship
between employer and employee.” The relationship between employees and the
workplace has changed in ways that require leaders to engage employees working either
in a hybrid or physical workplace balance their productivity, well-being and sense of
connection in the evolving future of work. The ”Net Better Off” model depicted in Figure
33 below provides us with specific best practices in creating new and better ways of
working.
 63

Figure 33. The “Net Better Off” model addressing the six fundamental human needs (Shook et
al., 2022).

However, Shook et al. (2022) found that 64% of individual’s potential defined by their
abilities to use their skills at work, is influenced by the six dimensions of “Net Better Off”,
where (1) the financial stability is neither the most powerful not the most underutilized
driver of employee performance, the (2) relational, (3) emotional and (4) purposeful
dimensions have the most strongly impact on employees behavior rather than the (5)
employability support, while the (6) physical well-being become more important during
COVID-19 as a critical driver of employee performance. In the context of “Net Better Off”
model, the leaders are provided with actionable steps that they can take to address more
dimensions of employee life.

Overall, creating a dynamic organization lies in creating an agile culture and new ways
of working in which leaders cultivate an agile mindset to continuously reinforce resources
and enhance employee performance.
 64

4.4.3 Analysis of Dynamic organization

An analysis of the key factors to digital transformation success as comprised by dynamic

organizations in the best practices and applicable to the case company challenges
revealed that creating an agile culture and discover a new way of working are the keys
to a successful digital transformation.

First, creating an agile culture that facilitates faster decision making, experimentation
and support innovation to continuously reinforce the resources and enhance the
employee performance. Creating a culture with high performance and long-range
employee satisfaction depends on teams build trust, cross functional collaboration, and
communication. (Goran et al., 2017). An agile work culture is also focused on coaching
and mentoring, monitoring progress, measuring the performance, peer-to-peer feedback
to share ideas or mistakes without the fear of “evaluation” or “performance review”.
(Jurisic et al., 2020).

Second, adopting the new ways of working based on agile way of building solutions that
can be generalized into robust assets for reuse by other teams, including cross functional
interactions across the organization. (Booth et al., 2018). This comprehensive approach
can be used at all levels of business by creating an environment where employees feel
connected to each other, and well to their leaders and work where they are seen, heard,
able to “forge relationships, create both personal and business value and impact, and
grow their careers” (Booth et al., 2018).

Third, creating an agile culture and adopting new ways of working require support from
senior leaders. Smet et al. (2018) suggests that getting leaders with agile mind-set on
board is the secret of successful organizational transformation. Therefore, developing
agile leadership capabilities in today’s workplace is necessary to make people feel
connected to each other and their work.

If summarized, the following changes would have a significant impact on the

organization:

1. Creating an agile culture that facilitates faster decision making, experimentation and
support innovation. (Goran et al., 2017).
 65

2. Establishing new ways of working by building a “digital factory” model consisting of

robust assets to be reused and continuously improved by other teams through cross
functional interactions across the organization. (Booth et al., 2018).

3. Developing an agile leadership and mindset to provide leaders at every level with
insights on how to enable the “omni-connected” employee experiences through the
future work model, “Net Better Off”. (Shook et al., 2022).

Summing up, the digitalization does not change the principles of organizational
governance, but since the speed of digital and traditional way of working is so different,
leaders might approach digital thoughtfully with consideration for the needs of
employees.

4.5 Conceptual Framework of This Thesis

The conceptual framework for this thesis follows the selected three areas and
dimensions of digital transformation identified in the Current State Analysis: (1)
Operations Optimization, (2) Digital talent and (3) Dynamic organization. Built on top of
these three dimensions, the conceptual framework includes three key elements resulted
from the best practices that are relevant to support the core theme of this thesis, building
a roadmap for digital transformation. The conceptual framework for this thesis is depicted
in Figure 34.

The proposal building is structured accordingly, including the barriers on the path to
accelerating the digital transformation and suggested solutions to overcome these
barriers based on the Data 2 findings.
 66

Creating an agile culture and a new way of Implementing a systematic approach in

working decision making
1. Creating an agile culture that facilitates faster 1. Refining the operations process to provide real-
decision making, experimentation and support time data for operating activities. (Atherton &
innovation. (Goran et al., 2017). Associates, 2022).
2. Establishing new way of working by building an 2. Implementing a governance operating model to
in-house “digital factory” to share knowledge drive quick and right decision making, enhance
and produce custom-made solutions to serve transparency and ensure a smooth coordination
customer’s needs faster. (Booth et al., 2018). among BUs and COE in the business.
3. Developing an agile leadership and mindset to (Accenture, 2020).
provide leaders with insights on how to enable
3. Utilizing optimally operational resources. (FPT
the “omni-connected” employee experiences.
Digital, 2022)
through the future work model, “Net Better
Off”. (Shook et al., 2022)

Dynamic Optimized
organization Operations
Digital
transformation

Digital Talent

Building digital capabilities for the workforce

of the future
1. Developing employee accelerated career path
and ladders within the organization to enhance
engagement among the digital talents and
leaders. (McKinsey & Company, 2018).
2. Building digital capabilities for the workforce of
the future by investing in upskilling and reskilling.
(Strack et al., 2017)
3. Creating a strategic workforce planning for
succeeding in closing the future skills gap,
recruiting, and retaining digital talent (Strack et
al., 2017)

Figure 34. Conceptual Framework of this thesis.

 67

For the roadmap building, the Conceptual framework proposes three key themes for Digital Transformation roadmap in Figure 35 below.

Figure 35. Conceptual Framework proposing the key elements of the Digital transformation roadmap
 68

As highlighted in Figure 35, the Conceptual framework consists of (a) three key elements
analysed here in Section 4, expanded from (b) the existing knowledge and best practices
relevant for this study, and finally (c) the key sources that contributed to the conceptual
framework.

The three key elements of the conceptual framework are identified as follows:

1. Operations optimization - Implementing a systematic approach in decision

making.

2. Digital talent – Building digital capabilities for the workforce of the future.

3. Dynamic organization – Creating an agile culture and a new way of working.

In the next section, the proposal is built based on the existing knowledge and best
practices that were synthesised into the conceptual framework.
 69

5 Building a Proposal for the Digital Transformation Roadmap for the

Case Company

This section focuses on the proposal building of the Digital Transformation Roadmap for
the case company. The initial proposal was built based on the results from the current
state analysis, the existing knowledge and best practices from the conceptual framework,
which were introduced in the previous two sections of the thesis. The proposal will be
build based on the internal discussions gathered in Data collection 2.

5.1 Overview of the Proposal Building Stage

The goal of this development initiative is to propose a clear and concise set of steps that
the case company can follow to achieve short-term and long-term goals in order to
accelerate its digital transformation.

The business challenge for the case company is to ensure that its Centers of Excellence
succeed to keep up the company's growth and development. The goal is to create a
roadmap as a strategic plan to accelerate the digital transformation within Centers of
Excellence and thus provide customized solutions for the business needs at the right
time.

Based on the best practices and the insights from the current state analysis, the key
areas to focus on for building the digital transformation roadmap were identified as the
(1) Operations Optimization, (2) Digital talent and (3) Dynamic organization. The
proposal building is structured accordingly, including the barriers on the path to
accelerating the digital transformation and suggested solutions to overcome these
barriers based on the Data 2 findings (Appendix 5).

The Data collection 2 involved internal interviews and brainstorming workshop with the
key stakeholders that generated potential solutions and recommendations to the
roadmap proposal. The selected key stakeholders were the Huld leaders, Competence
technical leads, the Head of Operations and Center of Excellence Directors.

First, the outcomes from current state analysis and conceptual framework were
introduced and analytical insights about current digital maturity level were reported using
Power BI. Second, the recommendations from the key stakeholders were discussed in
detail to understand the current maturity stage of the case company and identify the
 70

barriers on the path to digital transformation acceleration. Third, the key stakeholders
came up with suggestions to overcome the barriers, shared and built on each other’s
ideas in a dynamic brainstorming session. Finally, the collected Data 1 and Data 2 were
considered fundamental to building the Digital Transformation roadmap. Thus, the
proposal was built based on the Data 1 from CSA with focus on the digital transformation
maturity, the key focus areas from CF for building the digital transformation roadmap and
also the Data 2 inputs from the brainstorming workshop which are discussed in Section
5.2 below.

5.2 Findings from Data 2 (pulling together CSA, CF and Data 2 for the Proposal)

The fundamental inputs for building the proposal will consist of (1) Data 1 (findings from
CSA, earlier), and (2) CF (input from literature), as well as (3) Data 2 (from this co-
creation round).

Data Collection 2 concentrates on identifying suggestions from the key stakeholders,

proposing solutions to overcome the barriers to accelerating the digital transformation
across all three key areas: 1) Dynamic Organization, 2) Digital Talent, and 3) Optimized
Operations.

The following table provides the key stakeholders suggestions for the initial proposal in
relation to first, the selected focus areas from CSA and, second, to the inputs from
literature and best practice. Table 6 below provides the inputs for the proposal.
 71

Table 6. Key stakeholder suggestions (findings of Data 2) for Proposal building in relation to
findings from the CSA (Data 1) and the Conceptual framework.

Key focus area Input from Suggestions from Description of their

from CSA (from literature & best stakeholders for the suggestion (in detail)
Data 1) practices (CF) Proposal, summary
(from Data 2)

1 Operations: Low Implementing a a) Use streamline tools. The stakeholders

degree of systematic suggested to setup a
b) Have a systematic
digitization for approach in systematic process and
process and tool to
decision-making decision making use integrated tools to
streamline communication
process. that enhances streamline the
and operations, collaborate
transparency and communication and
more effectively to faster
ensures a smooth operations.
decision-making.
coordination
among the c) Have clear pilot cases

organization. providing the benefits

defined in the best practices.

2 Digital talent: Creating a strategic a) Acquire and adopt the The stakeholders
workforce planning powerful success stories for suggested to follow the
The company
for succeeding in supporting digital talent. example of success
does not have a
closing the future stories of digital
holistic resourcing b) Run programs to upskill
skills gap, transformation to help
plan and a and train employees to get
recruiting, and case company closing
roadmap in place through the most digitally
retaining digital the gap between talent
to rapidly skills competitors in the
talent. supply and demand, to
changing market”.
adapt to future
customer
c) Developing a holistic workforce by
expectations.
workforce plan. developing the future
skills.

3 Dynamic Developing an agile a) Develop professional The stakeholders

Organization: leadership and programs for leaders that suggested to provide
mindset to provide gives them better leaders with practical
The company
leaders with understanding of daily insights on building an
does not have an
insights on how to actions to build an agile agile culture and seek
agile culture rolled
enable the “omni- culture and new ways of better ways of working
out to drive digital
connected” work. that enable
transformation.
employee
b) Ensure that the benefits of
experiences.
the digital transformation are
well understood across BUs
and COE.
 72

As seen from Table 6, first, the findings related to Optimizing the operations identified in
CSA require to streamline the communication and operations to collaborate more
effectively to faster decision-making. Hence, the stakeholders requested that the
Element 1 of the proposal to focus on is having a systematic process using tools to
streamline the communication between BUs and COEs. These excerpts illustrate a
typical view of the participants to the workshop brainstorming activities:

“…There are various tools that may contain same information and do not
work well together. We need to use streamline tool either form the same
provider, integrating the APIs from existing tools, or create own tools.”
(Respondent 1)

“The targets are agreed but no clear target setting or follow-up of the
realized actions. We need to have clear “example” pilot cases proving the
benefits.” (Respondent 3).

Second, the inputs from stakeholders for Digital Talent identified in CSA require to
develop a holistic workforce plan to recruit and retain digital talent. Hence, the
stakeholders requested that the Element 2 of the proposal to focus on developing a
workforce plan with innovative ways to attract and retain talent. The participants to the
workshop identified the “lack of digital talent in the market”, “not having a long-term
recruiting plan” and considering “easier to continue working with legacy ways” as the
main barriers to jeopardize the company’s digital transformation journey. To overcome
these barriers, the case company needs to “acquire clear and real-life success stories
about the new ways of working.” (Respondent 7), “run programs to upskill and train
employees to get through the most digitally skills competitors in the market” (Respondent
8) and “developing a holistic workforce plan” (Respondent 9).

Third, the inputs from stakeholders for Dynamic Organization identified in CSA require
to create an agile culture and new ways of working. Hence, the stakeholders requested
that the Element 3 of the proposal to focus on is developing professional programs for
leaders that gives them better understanding of daily actions and behavior needed to
build an agile culture and starting to transform the work culture. These excerpts illustrate
a typical view of the participants to the workshop brainstorming activities:
 73

“…The upper management is not actively acting as sponsors for the

change. We need to elevate the digital transformation as one of the
company’s strategical projects.” (Respondent 5)

As the key stakeholders suggested, the case company needs to take clear and effective
ways to overcome the barriers on the path to digital acceleration and build a digital
transformation roadmap. These include implementing a systematic approach in decision
making, building digital capabilities for the workforce of the future and creating an agile
culture and a new way of working.

5.3 Proposal Draft / Initial Proposal

The initial proposal evaluates the findings across the selected three areas of the
roadmap in which the case company can accelerate its digital transformation. These
findings are derived from the evaluation of the company’s digital maturity in the Current
State Analysis of digital transformation (section 3.4) and the compilation of the business
literature and most relevant best practices by Accenture, Boston Consulting Group
(BCG) and McKinsey synthesised in the Conceptual Framework of this thesis (section
4.5).

Upon the evaluation of the key areas, the findings point to three core elements of the
initial proposal: (1) the Operations core element that can improve the quality of work and
ensure customer satisfaction is the implementation of a Systematic digital approach in
decision making, (2) the Digital talent core element that enhances the changes to digital
transformation to succeed points to building capabilities for the workforce of the future,
and (3) the core element to creating a Dynamic organization lies in creating an agile
culture and new ways of working.
Figure 36 shows the overview of the digital transformation roadmap harmonizing the
conceptual framework with the current state analysis results, and Data 2 collected from
the workshop and discussed with the stakeholders.
 74

Figure 36. The Digital Transformation Roadmap for the case company (Initial proposal)

Therefore, the initial proposal for the digital transformation roadmap is built on three key
areas: Operations, Digital Talent, and Organization. The core elements synthesize and
impact each other in the transformation process. This roadmap is built in connection with
the implementation timeline and driven outcomes.

A brief description of three core elements of the initial roadmap in explained in the
following sections below.
 75

5.3.1 Element 1 of the Initial Proposal: Operations Optimization – Implementing a

systematic approach in decision making

The survey results in the current state analysis revealed that the organization has many
manual activities in most of the processes, e.g. production scheduling, forecasting and
data is likewise fragmented and often missing or not valid. Furthermore, the processes
including administrative tasks are not fully automated and the current CRM tool and
business analytics are used with limited capabilities. This customer experience is not
leveraged as input for feedback loop into processes.

According to the existing knowledge and best practices, an automated and optimized
process can ensure easiest monitoring and faster obtain the information. Moreover, a
systematic approach in decision making can drastically reduce the risk from human
errors and data loss and also improve data monitoring to keep leaders informed about
employees’ performance or other changes and make decision immediately when it
counts.

The evolution of Element 1, Operations Optimization from different phases in the

research process is depicted in Figures 37 below.

Figure 37. The Evolution from CSA findings to Element 1, Optimized Operations.
 76

As seen in Figure 37, the journey so far has been to drive from wide areas of gaps and
ideas as a result of Current State Analysis and literature review to develop clear
objectives of establishing the digital transformation maturity level. From there on, the
Operations Optimization, as the first key focus area for accelerating the digital
transformation, derived and based on the Conceptual Framework along with the findings
from Data 2, the required changes were grouped into corresponding core element as
part of the initial proposal. The following are proposed steps for the case company to
implement a systematic approach in decision making:

1. Refine the operations process for providing real-time reliable data for operating
activities syncing with customer experience vision.

2. Implement a governance operating model to ensure a smooth coordination among

BUs and COE in the business.

3. Utilize optimally operational resources.

The organization can follow this set of steps to optimize its operations which drive the
acceleration of digital transformation.

5.3.2 Element 2 of the Initial Proposal: Digital Talent – Building digital capabilities for
the workforce of the future

The findings from the current state analysis revealed that (1) there are no dedicated
leaders to manage or drive digital initiatives and (2) the organization onboards digital
talents into new roles and has started to adapt towards digital working collaboratively
under a good executive guidance. Most of the employees already have the digital skills
they need today, but the company does not have a strategic workforce plan.

Based on the existing knowledge and best practices, the digitally talented people are so
highly demand that the companies must reinvent themselves to attract them. Therefore,
the way to manage with this challenge is to build digital capabilities and develop a
strategic workforce plan for succeeding in closing the future skills gap, recruiting, and
retaining digital talent. Once the skills gaps are identified, an adequate preparation for
the future provides the company with a competitive advantage within its business that
will distinguish the successful company from its competitors.
 77

The evolution of Element 2, Digital talent from different phases in the research process
is depicted in Figures 38 below.

Figure 38. The Evolution from CSA findings to Element 2, Digital Talent.

As seen in Figure 38, the CSA analysis and literature review set out clear objectives of
determining the digital transformation maturity level. the Digital talent was identified as
the second key focus area for accelerating the digital transformation, based on the CF
along with the findings from Data 2. The following are proposed steps for the case
company to build digital capabilities for the workforce of the future:

1. Develop employee accelerated career path and ladders to enhance engagement

among the digital talents and leaders in the digital transformation journey.

2. Build digital capabilities for the workforce of the future by investing in upskilling and
reskilling.

3. Develop a strategic workforce plan for succeeding in closing the future skills gap.

The organization can follow this set of steps to build the capabilities for the workforce of
the future which drive the acceleration of digital transformation.
 78

5.3.3 Element 3 of the Initial Proposal: Dynamic Organization – Creating an agile

culture and a new way of working

According to the digital acceleration index survey, the company experiments with agile
ways of working but there is no agile culture rolled out across businesses to deliver
measurable business value and the organizational, governance and technology agility
enablers are not addressed.

Furthermore, an agile management of working was suggested from the interviews with
stakeholders, that pointed out to the values of knowledge sharing among the employees,
in which knowledge about tools, culture, libraries, development environment settings or
best practices can be shared.

Based on the existing knowledge and best practices, an agile culture would facilitate
faster decision making and support innovation to continuously reinforce the resources
and enhance the employee performance. An agile culture depends on teams build trust,
cross functional collaboration, and communication. Moreover, the new ways of working
based on the agile way of collecting robust assets for reuse can generate personal as
well as business value impact.

The evolution of Element 3, Dynamic Organization from different phases in the research
process is depicted in Figures 39 below.

Figure 39. The Evolution from CSA findings to Element 3, Dynamic Organization.
 79

As seen in Figure 39, the CSA analysis and best practices set out clear objectives for
the dynamic platform organization, including agile at scale and new ways of working. The
Dynamic organization was identified as the third focus area for accelerating the digital
transformation, based on the CF along with the findings from Data 2. The following are
proposed steps for the case company to create an agile culture and new way of working:

1. Create an agile culture that facilitates faster decision making, experimentation and
support innovation.

2. Establish new way of working by building an in-house “digital factory” to share

knowledge and produce custom-made solutions to serve customer’s needs faster.

3. Develop an agile leadership and mindset to provide leaders with insights on how to
enable the “omni-connected” employee experiences.

The organization can follow this set of steps to create an agile culture and implement a
new way of working that are imperative for accelerating its digital transformation.

5.4 Summary of the Initial Proposal

This section outlines the three core elements of the digital transformation roadmap for
the case company based on the key stakeholders feedback collected in Data 2. Figure
40 shows the initial blueprint of the digital transformation roadmap developed for the
case company. The initial proposal presented in Figure 40 below defines the roadmap
core elements linked to the proposed timeframe to achieve defined outcomes.
 80

Figure 40. Initial proposal of the Digital Transformation Roadmap created for leadership team by using ClickUp tool
 81

The proposal for developing the three core elements of the roadmap is built by
performing a list of tasks following a timeline and priority order for the responsible teams
represented by the Top management, COEs, Huld leaders and competence leads. The
timeframe for the roadmap framework depends on the company strategy and availability
of resources:

Element 1: Operations Optimization – Expected implementation time is 1 year.

Implementing a systematic digital
approach in decision making

Element 2: Digital Talent – Building digital Expected implementation time 1 year.

capabilities for the workforce of the future

Element 3: Dynamic Organization – Expected implementation time in 1-2

Creating an agile culture and a new way years.
of working

Based on the suggestions received from the key stakeholders, the roadmap will be built
following the tasks priorities for all three core elements.

The proposal addresses the needs and targets of the case company and provides a
roadmap as a strategic planning and implementation of the digital transformation.

This proposal is a baseline version accepted by case company to further plan and come
up with detailed activities applicable to the organization as well as to enable their
implementation. Therefore, the roadmap will be validated in the third context by the key
stakeholders and the feedback will be evaluated and actioned in the next chapter.
 82

6 Validation of the Proposal

This section reports on the results of the feedback and validation of the initial proposal
developed in Section 5. First, an overview of the proposal shows the logic of performing
the validation phase. Second, the findings from Data collection 3 and further
developments are discussed separately for each core element of the Roadmap Proposal.
Third, the Final proposal for the Digital Transformation Roadmap is presented.

6.1 Overview of the Validation Stage

The purpose of validation stage was to conduct a feasibility testing of the roadmap to
ensure the reliability of the proposal and get an idea of how achievable the roadmap
implementation is. For this end, the key stakeholders represented by COE Director, Head
of operations, Huld leaders and competence leads have provided their expert judgement
of the Initial proposal. The validation stage focused on the three core elements that form
the basis of the roadmap with the planned timeframe. In addition, the abstract of the
thesis was presented to the key stakeholder to provide them with a broad overview of
what the research was about, what are the outputs of the research and concluding with
their benefits for the company.

The recommendations from the key stakeholders (gathered and analysed as Data 3)
provided the basis for undertaken improvements to the Initial proposal.

The validation of the proposal was conducted in two phases. First, the initial proposal
was presented individually to the COE Director and to the group of team leaders,
competence leads and Head of operations. These key stakeholders brought the most
valuable insights as they have leadership experience, and they are behind all decisions
and daily interactions across company. Second, the key stakeholders were requested to
assess the initial proposal and provide recommendations.

All recommendations from the stakeholders related to the three core elements of the
roadmap with the planned timeframe were discussed and written down to be considered
as further improvements in building the final proposal. Based on the comments and
recommendations, the final proposal for the roadmap was created.
 83

6.2 Developments to the Proposal (based on Data Collection 3)

Throughout the validation session, the inputs and development improvements received
from the key stakeholders were discussed.

The feedback from the COE Director was that the research covered relevant key areas
that can make company business moving forward.

“The defined roadmap makes sense, and it is valuable for us to implement

it and bring things forward.“ (COE Director, November 2022)

As a recommendation, exemplifying the actions through the use of digital transformation

roadmap, the new concepts and tools names would be much easier for the management
team to interpret the roadmap.

The feedback from team leaders and competence leads was limited to the timeframe
due to the different level of complexity to implement the defined tasks:

“Well, I think people don't want to grasp the idea of ticking clock on
implementing the tasks. It's important to estimate how complex the task is,
because if we have to cope with the “low hanging fruit”, then it will be easier
just to accomplish the task and celebrate the accomplishment. But we have
some tasks that are more complex, and they will take a lot of resources and
time.” (Huld leader, November 2022)

Therefore, the complexity of the tasks has been assessed more carefully, so the
timeframe of 1-2 years for the roadmap would require to be extended to 2-3 years.

Next sub-sections clearly state the feedback provided by experts to further develop the
core elements of the Initial proposal.

6.2.1 Developments to Element 1 of the Initial Proposal: Operations Optimization –

Implementing a systematic approach in decision making

The development suggestions to the Operations Optimization on implementing a

systematic approach in decision-making pointed to the tools involved in the operations
 84

process. The experts suggested that an assessment of the tools to support the decision-
making should be added to the operations tasks of the Initial roadmap proposal. The
complexity of tasks and resources risk to accomplish the tasks within the proposed
timeframe concerned for the key stakeholders.

The key feedback areas with the inputs from the validation discussion are summarised
in Table 7 below.

Table 7. Summary of the findings from Data 3 collected in the validation of the Element 1 of the
initial Proposal.

Elements of the Parts commented in Description of the Development to the

Initial Validation comment/ feedback Initial Roadmap
Roadmap by experts (in detail) proposal
proposal
1 Operations a) Refine the operations The experts The assessment of the
Optimization – process for providing real- suggested to add the decision-making tools is
Implementing a time reliable data for assessment of tools included in the existing
systematic operating activities that can be used in operations tasks of the
digital approach syncing with customer decision making. roadmap.
in decision experience vision.
making b) Implement a Confirmed. The timeframe is updated
governance operating Minor fixes with to allow management
model to ensure a smooth timeframe team to successfully
coordination among BUs emphasizing on the accomplish the task.
and COE in the business. due date.
c) Utilize optimally Confirmed. The timeframe is updated
operational resources. Minor fixes with to allow management
timeframe team to successfully
emphasizing on the accomplish the task.
due date.

Table 7 above summarizes the inputs from the key stakeholders collected during the
validation of the Initial proposal. The stakeholders confirmed that the Initial proposal had
comprehensible steps for the case company to implement a systematic approach in
decision making:

“The operations process actually affects our everyday working lives. I think the
proposal for the operation optimization has been really well defined and we need
to take these actions and implement." (COE Head of operations, November
2022)
 85

Following the valuable recommendations, the assessment of the decision-making tools

was added, and the timeframe was increased to allow management team to successfully
accomplish the tasks.

6.2.2 Developments to Elements 2 of the Initial Proposal: Digital Talent – Building

digital capabilities for the workforce of the future

The proposed steps in building the digital capabilities for the workforce of the future were
approved in the evaluation of the initial roadmap proposal. The key stakeholders were
concerned about the short timeframe to reach the proposed goals suggesting to setup a
realistic timeframe to successfully accomplish the proposed tasks.

Table 8 below provides the key feedback areas with the inputs from the validation
discussion.

Table 8. Summary of the findings from Data 3 collected in the validation of the Element 2 of the
initial Proposal.

Elements of the Parts commented in Description of the Development to the

Initial Validation comment/ Initial Roadmap
Roadmap feedback by proposal
proposal experts (in detail)
2 Digital Talent – a) Develop employee Confirmed. The timeframe is updated
Building digital accelerated career path and Minor fixes with to allow management
capabilities for ladders to enhance timeframe team to successfully
the workforce of engagement among the emphasizing on the accomplish the task.
the future digital talents and leaders in due date.
the digital transformation
journey.
b) Build digital capabilities Confirmed. The timeframe is updated
for the workforce of the Minor fixes with to allow management
future by investing in timeframe team to successfully
upskilling and reskilling. emphasizing on the accomplish the task.
due date.

c) Develop a strategic Confirmed. The timeframe is updated

workforce plan for Minor fixes with to allow management
succeeding in closing the timeframe team to successfully
future skills gap. emphasizing on the accomplish the task.
due date.
 86

As seen from Table 8, the Digital talent perspective on building digital capabilities for the
workforce of the future did not receive any major suggestions. The stakeholders
confirmed that the proposed roadmap has clear steps for the case company to build the
workforce of the future and decided to implement them immediately:

“We have tried for a few years to have a workforce plan, building up a skills
bank for this company that is under the competence development
management and planning what kind of competencies are needed. The
inputs are expected from the business units, but quite often they are not
able to give kind of a precise inputs. We are using quite ad-hoc
environments and doing manual work. Instead of that, we would need to
build this workforce plan based on the market insights on what kind of
workforce do we actually need in the future.” (COE Director, November
2022)

Following the suggestions from the key stakeholders, the timeframe, resources and cost
factors needed a rigorous evaluation and adjustments to allow leadership team to
successfully accomplish the tasks.

6.2.3 Developments to Elements 3 of the Initial Proposal: Dynamic Organization –

Creating an agile culture and a new way of working

The Dynamic organization perspective of the roadmap was agreed to include the steps
defined in the initial proposal. New concepts and framework models from the best
practices were presented to the key stakeholders during the validation and they
recommended to introduce them into an initial phase prior starting to implement the
roadmap. This will require setting up a realistic timeframe to successfully accomplish the
additional task.

Table 9 below provides the key feedback areas with the inputs from the validation
discussion.
 87

Table 9. Summary of the findings from Data 3 collected in the validation of the Element 3 of the
initial Proposal.

Elements of the Parts commented in Description of the Development to the

Initial Roadmap Validation comment/ feedback by Initial Roadmap
proposal experts (in detail) proposal
3 Dynamic a) Create an agile Confirmed. The timeframe is
Organization – culture that facilitates Minor fixes with timeframe updated to allow
Creating an agile faster decision emphasizing on the due management team to
culture and a making, date. successfully
new way of experimentation and accomplish the task.
working support innovation.
b) Establish new way The experts recommended An initial phase is added
of working by building to introduce the new to the roadmap for
an in-house “digital concepts and frameworks introducing the new
factory” to share used in defining the digital concepts and
knowledge and transformation roadmap to frameworks.
produce custom- help the management team
made solutions to easily interpret the roadmap.
serve customer’s
needs faster.
c) Develop an agile The experts recommended An initial phase is added
leadership and to introduce the new to the roadmap for
mindset to provide concepts and frameworks introducing the new
leaders with insights used in defining the digital concepts and
on how to enable the transformation roadmap to frameworks.
“omni-connected” help the management team
employee easily interpret the roadmap.
experiences.

Table 9 above summarizes the suggestions from the key stakeholders to the initial
proposal development. The key stakeholders agreed that the initial proposal provided
comprehensive plans and actions to create an agile culture and a new way of working:

“I fully agree with that statement that we must find new ways of doing
things. … And it highlights the importance of actions to implement not only
informal, but we would actually have someone with the responsibility to
drive things forward.” (COE Director, November 2022)

To help the management team easily interpret the roadmap, an additional task was
added to the roadmap for introducing the new concepts and frameworks models used in
defining the digital transformation roadmap.
 88

The stakeholders agreed that the roadmap is set to be implemented immediately, and
the timeframe and resources responsible for implementing it should be carefully
monitored. The created roadmap includes a detailed description of each element and
tasks name, description, schedule, priority, and responsible teams such as COE, Huld
leaders, Competence leads, Top management tagged. Thus, the proposal should
provide complete details for each element of the roadmap and act as a reference plan
for the management team to implement the digital transformation roadmap for the case
company.

“It's a concrete proposal because that's what the management team needs. So,
yes, we have identified an issue and then you have identified the way how to solve
it. And I think it's been much easier to advance things when we have an idea of a
solution. And even the owner, who will take care of implementing these things, I
think that it would be quite natural to proceed with.” (COE Director, November
2022)

6.3 Final Proposal

This section presents the final proposal of the digital transformation roadmap after the
discussion and feedback on the initial proposal. The initial proposal was revised, and the
changes based on the feedback and suggestions from the key stakeholders were
implemented in the final proposal.

The final proposal of the roadmap to digital transformation is presented in Figure 41

below.
 89

Huld's Digital Transformation Roadmap 2 - 3 years

Element 1: Operations Optimization -Systematic digital approach in decision making

Task Name Task Content Due Date Priority Team (drop down) Type (drop down)
1. Refine the operations process and assess the tools Refining the operations process and tools assessment for providing real-time reliable
to streamline the coordination among the data for operating activities syncing with customer experience vision.
organization. 31.3.2023 HIGH Top management Improvement
Implementing a governance operating model to drive quick and right decision
making, enhance transparency in business activities and ensure a smooth
2. Implement a governance operating model
coordination among BUs and COE in the business.
30.6.2024 URGENT CoEs Improvement
Utilizing optimally operational resources.
3. Use optimally the operational resources 30.6.2024 URGENT Huld Leaders Improvement

Element 2: Digital Talent - Building digital capabilities for the workforce of the future
Task Name Due Date
Priority Team (drop down) Type (drop down)
Developing employee accelerated career path and ladders within the organization to
enhance engagement among the digital talents and leaders in the digital
1. Develop employee accelerated career path transformation journey with active transformation initiatives and dedicated full time
to a change effort.
31.12.2024 HIGH Huld Leaders Improvement
2. Build digital capabilities for the workforce of the Building digital capabilities for the workforce of the future by investing in upskilling
future and reskilling. 30.6.2025 NORMAL Competence Leads Improvement
Developing a strategic workforce plan for succeeding in closing the future skills gap,
3. Develop a strategic workforce plan recruiting and retaining digital talent.
30.6.2023 HIGH CoEs Feature

Element 3: Dynamic Organization - Creating an agile culture and a new way of working

Task Name Due Date

Priority Team (drop down) Type (drop down)
Creating an agile culture that facilitates faster decision making, experimentation and
1. Create an agile culture support innovation.
31.3.24 HIGH Top management Feature
Establishing new ways of working by building a “digital factory” model consisting of
2. Establish new ways of working by building a “digital robust assets to be reused and continuously improved by other teams through cross
factory” model functional interactions across the organization.
31.3.25 NORMAL Competence Leads Improvement
Developing an agile leadership and mindset to provide leaders at every level with
3. Develop an agile leadership and mindset insights on how to enable the “omni-connected” employee experiences through the
future work model, “Net Better Off”.
30.6.25 NORMAL Huld Leaders Improvement
The experts recommended to introduce the new concepts and frameworks used in
4. Introduction into new concepts and frameworks the best practices for defining the digital transformation roadmap to help the
from best practices management team easily interpret the roadmap.
31.3.23 URGENT CoEs Feature

Figure 41. Final Proposal of the Digital Transformation Roadmap created for leadership team by using ClickUp tool
 90

As seen from Figure 41, the final proposal includes the core elements of the proposed
roadmap with corresponding steps to be implemented. The developments to these core
elements were mainly focused on providing accurate description to the roadmap
elements and other entities involved in the implementation of the final proposal.

The roadmap created by using the ClickUp tool gives a practical approach to
implementation of defined tasks including the type of features, the team responsible for
implementing the specific tasks along with their priority and due date.

It is recommended that the steps suggested above are taken into action to ensure a
smooth and effective implementation of the roadmap framework into practice.
 91

7 Conclusion

This section summarizes the key findings of this study. The executive summary
describes the main steps and results of the study. Then, next steps towards
implementation are proposed. Finally, the quality of research results are discussed and
the outcome of this thesis is evaluated.

7.1 Executive Summary

The goal of this study was to propose a digital transformation roadmap for the case
company which would enable it to continuously innovate, become more responsive to
the evolving customer needs and acquire capabilities successfully through Centers of
Excellence to stay ahead of digital changes. The roadmap should visualize the core
elements that support the digital transformation with a defined timeframe for
implementing and achieving the desired outcomes.

The research process in this Thesis was conducted by utilizing the applied action
research and qualitative research method. By using the applied action research, the
research and development process were combined to solve a practical challenge which
typically relates to continuous enhancement and improvement in organization. The data
collection involved qualitative research methods through questionnaires, interviews,
publications, and workshops.

By assessing the current state of the existing digital transformation maturity of the case
company, the study qualified the case company as a digital literate that is aware about
digital systems as an opportunity to speed up and optimize the operations as well as
changing the way of working without having a well-defined digital strategy and roadmap
to execute the digital vision. Thus, an integrated overall digital transformation journey
has not been defined and a roadmap has not been developed yet to reach company’s
digital ambition. Furthermore, the key findings from the current state analysis (gathered
from analysing Data 1) point first, to the strengths and the weaknesses of the case
company and, second, to the most relevant areas as necessary blocks for building a
roadmap to digital transformation for the case company.
 92

The available literature and best practice for creating a roadmap to digital transformation
identified relevant guidance for building such a roadmap. An effective way for achieving
better business outcomes is looking at the best practices the leaders as Accenture,
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and McKinsey operate in accelerating digital
transformation across their organization and to introduce their processes and ways of
working into the case company. As a result of best practices review and the current state
analysis, the key areas to focus on for building the digital transformation roadmap were
identified as the (1) Operations Optimization, (2) Digital talent and (3) Dynamic
organization.

The initial proposal identified the barriers on the path to accelerating the digital
transformation and the solutions to overcome these barriers across the selected three
areas of the roadmap. These findings were brainstormed in a workshop and the inputs
provided by the key stakeholders were collected as Data 2 findings. The findings point
to three core elements of the initial proposal: (1) the Operations element that can
enhance the cross collaboration between BUs and COEs is the implementation of a
Systematic digital approach in decision making, (2) the Digital talent element that
enhances the changes to digital transformation to succeed points to building capabilities
for the workforce of the future, and (3) the Dynamic organization element resides in
creating an agile culture and new ways of working. These core elements defined the
roadmap over a proposed timeframe to achieve the required outcomes.

The initial proposal was analyzed and validated by the key stakeholders. The benefits
for each element of the roadmap and timeframe to implement the roadmap were
discussed and the inputs were collected as Data 3. Based on the recommendations
provided by the key stakeholders, the requested improvements were made, and the final
proposal was developed.

The Leadership team assessed the impact of proposed roadmap and brainstormed the
implementation process as well as its risk factors. Though the initial timeframe of the
roadmap implementation for the case company was the next 1-2 years, the different
complexity level of the proposed tasks was considered a challenge to the effective
implementation of the roadmap in a such a short period of time. So, the timeframe was
increased to a more realistic 2–3 years plan.
 93

The implementation plan of the proposed digital transformation roadmap by the case
company will help the case company to better overcome the barriers to accelerate the
digital transformation and continuously innovate to stay ahead of changes.

7.2 Managerial Implications (Next Steps and Recommendations toward

Implementation)

The roadmap is created to support leaders and management making decisions regarding
future development processes, workforce planning, building capabilities and strategy
work. There will be a Digital transformation program started in the beginning of 2023 that
will help in prioritizing the tasks, defining the eventual sub-tasks and responsibilities to
drive things forward.

Further steps towards the final proposal implementation can be considered as follows.
First, the implementation of the roadmap framework started already to be implemented
in the Digital talent area. With the main implication of company’s leaders, a skills bank
company tool has been developed to identify the digital talent gap. The skills bank started
to be tested and currently holds almost all employees’ information based on the
competences and skill level, with the plan to fulfil this tool and setup the integration with
the resourcing allocation tool used by the case company.

Thus, closing the gap between talent resources and customer demand, depends first, on
individual digital talent actions to add and maintain their skills profile and second, on
leadership team to identify the needs for upskilling and reskilling to build the digital
capabilities for the workforce of the future. Now that the skills bank tool has been tested,
the COE should emphasize its value and benefits to engage the digital talent and BUs
to adopt the new tool.

Further features such as statistical snapshot of effective skills development and

recommended skills to succeed in the role can be added to the Skills bank tool to cover
the proposed three steps to build digital capabilities for the workforce of the future.

Second, the steps to making an effective decision can be introduced to the leaders and
managers to further clarify the meaning of systematic approach in decision making. In
addition, an assessment of the effective tools to be used in decision making will allow
BUs and COE to execute smooth coordination in the business.
 94

Third, new concepts and models are addressed to help management team get a clear
understanding of them and easily interpret the roadmap.

The tasks details and implementation progress of each roadmap element is carefully
monitored based on development milestones. The responsible teams for implementing
the assigned action items to build the roadmap are agreed. The most potentially
impactful risks involved with the roadmap implementation include the resources
availability, financial constraints, and organizational changes. To mitigate the risk factors
that arise due to limited resources and financial constraints, a common approach is
agreed with the responsible team to prioritizing the roadmap action items across shared
resources and consistent monitoring of the budget is foreseen.

7.3 Thesis Evaluation

The objective of this Master’s Thesis was to create a roadmap to accelerate the digital
transformation within Centers of Excellence. The expected outcome of this study was a
step-by-step roadmap as a strategic plan to accelerate the digital transformation for the
case company.

The main purpose of creating this roadmap was to provide the case company with a
comprehensive tool that allows to take the right steps to overcome the barriers to digital
transformation and continuously innovate to stay ahead of digital changes.

During the research, the roadmap was developed and then resulted into three core
elements that were equally addressed in this study. The resulting roadmap can now be
used by the case company, as well as by similar organizations willing to adopt digital
transformation as part of their business strategy.

The research method helped the study to proceed according to the iterative stages, and
to reach the objective of the Thesis in the most effective way. The collected data was
gathered in accordance with the research method and provided by the most relevant
stakeholders via conducted questionnaires, interviews, workshops, and discussions in
order to collect the best data and analyze it correctly.
 95

The current state analysis pointed to the main strengths and weaknesses identified in
the assessment process of the case company. It helped to better understand the needs
and opportunities of the key stakeholders and customer expectations. The literature
review helped in acquiring the knowledge and best practices from the leader
organizations that operate in accelerating digital transformation.

The digital transformation roadmap was the outcome of extensive discussions held with
the COE Director, Head of Operations, team leaders and competence managers. The
initial proposal was improved based on the development suggestions provided by the
key stakeholders during the validation stage. To mitigate the key stakeholders concern
about the complexity of some of the proposed elements to be implemented within this
roadmap, the timeframe was increased accordingly to allow management team
implementing and achieving the desired outcomes.

7.4 Closing Words

This Thesis emphasized the importance of building a step-by-step roadmap for the case
company as a strategic plan to accelerate the digital transformation within Centers of
Excellence. The proposed roadmap was built based on a comprehensive analysis
resulted into three core elements of the roadmap that were equally addressed.

Rather than finding solutions to an already existing problem, the hardest part in doing
this research was to identify the challenges which the case company may encounter in
the future and for that it needs to be prepared take the right steps to overcome the
barriers to digital transformation, imagine the future and continuously innovate to stay
ahead of changes.

The digital transformation has different shapes and areas, depending on the needs of
the business and industry requirements. The core of digital transformation is not the tools
or technology. It is a cultural change, optimized operations, and the capabilities for the
workforce of the future along with a leadership mindset that allow companies to become
agile and more responsive to the constantly evolving customer needs.

The roadmap maps out a high-level plan, defining the major steps to develop a clear
path to the acceleration of digital transformation as part of Huld Ltd growth strategy.
 96

I believe that the implementation of the actions outlined by this roadmap will enhance
the culture, the operations, and capabilities for the workforce of the future, making Huld
a digital performer that builds digital proficiency and coordinate the capabilities
successfully. This phenomenon is called acceleration of digital transformation.
 1

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Appendix 1: BCG’s Digital Acceleration Index Questionnaire (Data collection

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Appendix 2: BCG’s Digital Acceleration Index Questionnaire Responses

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Appendix 3: Digital Transformation Acceleration Questionnaire and

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Appendix 4: Digital Transformation Acceleration Questionnaire and

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Appendix 5: Workshop for Building the Proposal (Data collection 2)