Digital Strategy

Drive Business Change with Tech + Operating Model Transformation

July 31, 2021

I was brought into my current role at ASTM to deliver change, as I have many times throughout my career. But this time, it seemed different. I was walking into a traditional organization with a clear and aggressive vision of transformation. So how can we drive business change with tech and operating model transformation?

Key Takeaways

ASTM aims to drive business change through a transformative vision that integrates technology and operating models.
The organization performed a holistic audit to identify strengths and weaknesses in its current IT structure.
Two key focuses emerged: creating a more agile culture and enhancing technological capability for future growth.
Modernizing technology is essential for improving business agility and reducing operational costs.
Successful transformation relies on a coordinated effort between executive vision and strategic technology adoption.

ASTM, at its core, has traditionally been a standards organization. It develops and publishes voluntary consensus technical standards for a wide range of materials, products, systems, and services. We have a consortium of 30,000-plus scientists, engineers, researchers, and academics who volunteer their time. They develop and maintain over 13,000 current standards across several industries.

However, the transformative vision moved beyond this traditional model and into a digital future. Here, business, technology, and operating models worked hand in hand to deliver new value. New business models were brought to the market. This is truly how you drive business change.

At the end of the day, to realize the full vision for the organization, each member of the executive team would be affected by the enabling technology. We embarked on a Value Stream Mapping exercise at the outset of the initiative. This connected our current state to the future vision in a tangible and actionable way.

This alignment allowed us to implement a data-driven, agile process. It not only backed up our progress with data and results but also allowed us to take the necessary steps. This drove business change and ushered in change across the company. We built the organizational structure, operating model, and culture. These would allow us to modernize and gain adoption of our technology.

Organizational Structure + Operating model + Culture

To drive business change, I started where I always start, by listening. We performed a holistic audit of our current state of the IT organization. Documenting the technologies, processes, capabilities, and org structure gave us a sense of the current bandwidth and velocity of the organization. This insight allowed me to not only uncover the opportunities to move quickly but also identify the challenges. They might stand in the way to achieve our vision. This insight allowed me to align the executive team around core elements of our transformation approach. We determined where we would need to make investments. These fell into two buckets:

1) Agility: We needed to create a more agile culture to increase our output velocity. At the same time, we tracked results to provide visibility back to the business while we worked to accomplish our objectives.

2) Capability: While our technology, incredibly knowledgeable staff, partners, and vendors were allowing us to maintain our leadership position in the industry, we weren’t making the strides. Nor were we placing the right bets to truly maximize our value. We needed to focus our resources and double down on how technology could create the pathway to our vision for the future.

At the end of the day, transforming an internal IT organization, structure, and working model really comes down to two critical elements – the culture and the people. The first is about being more agile with the ability to work faster with greater quality. The second is about creating a dynamic ‘right-sourced’ resource infrastructure. This connects the right capability matrix internally with the right partner matrix. They can augment our business needs. We work with several strategic partners, from the likes of PwC, TestingXperts, and Icreon. They help establish the right external capability matrix. They execute against our vision to bring ASTM 2.0 to life.

Importance of modernizing technology

Throughout my career, I’ve seen, first-hand, the transition of industry from being product or service driven to technology driven. In almost every industry, every business today is becoming a technology business tomorrow, if it hasn’t already happened.

Now, with the adoption of AI, IoT, and other new technologies, the value that companies can provide through technology is becoming exponential. In reality, today’s modern businesses are synonymous with technology. Not only can they generate better experiences and build new value propositions for growth, but they can also systematically reduce operating costs and overheads for the organization. Simply put, these technologies can help drive business change.

This transformation doesn’t just happen. It is a careful coordination of business and technology, where executive teams set the vision for the company. They then leverage the right technologies. These bring that vision to life for their customers, partners, and employees. Technology isn’t an end-all and be-all. However, when utilized strategically and applied accordingly, it can become a crucial enabler for a business.