Here, Noorddin Taj,  Strategy Architecture and Digital Innovation leader at bp shares his five steps to improve the odds of success.

#1 Align your business strategy and technology strategy
It is paramount that you have the right technology strategy aligned with your business strategy when starting your digital journey. Market preferences, technological capabilities, and regulations change frequently. Successful businesses anticipate that they will go through cycles of maturation that demand systematic transition. The company’s vision and business strategy need to be adaptable to fit with market demands, and your digital strategy needs to be flexible to evolve with market conditions.

#2 Set up scalable, modular innovation platforms
A modular, fit for purpose, reusable,  scalable and secure technology platform is fundamental for success in your digital transformation journey. As technology evolves rapidly, the platform should support evolving business requirements and emerging technologies. The innovation platform should incorporate APIs, micro-services and have serverless features that can ramp up and down and have the flexibility to add or remove features based on rapid changes in market demand and evolving technology ecosystem.

#3 Invest in talent and capability

Promote a self-leadership connector manager to help the team access the suitable sources to fulfil skill gaps and realise interdependencies of work, especially in larger organisations.
The manager’s role is to create and cultivate a digital culture – an open and transparent environment for team development. People are the biggest asset of an organisation. Invest in talent so your organisation can survive and thrive in these rapidly changing environments.

#4 Create an organisational culture with committed leadership

Successful digital transformation thrives on committed and empathetic leadership. Digital savvy leaders drive innovation by empowering cross-functional team collaboration to innovate and provide ideation channels, with good business understanding and platforms for experimentation. Leaders must also dedicate adequate time and resources to the process of digitalisation.

Agility, in its true sense, is not just a process. It is a way to quickly try new ideas, fail fast, learn from the failure, and use the experience and feedback to improve and continue the innovation cycle until it is successful.

Your organisation culture should support continuous learning, continuous improvement and continuous ideation, and be external facing to bring innovation from different industries. The culture of agility within a company is essential. If you are not agile, you will not be able to make the rapid changes required. If you have too many layers in your organisation, it creates a bottleneck and delays decision making.

#5 Embed cybersecurity into your technology strategy

Integrating digital security is a fundamental part of the digital journey; as you accelerate digital, ensure the proper security measures are in place – right from the start of building an innovation platform.