When your company undertakes digital transformation, undoubtedly a primary activity will be building a digital platform. As digital transforms companies, their digital platform becomes a differentiator. Building your platform is a crucial activity, as it will enable your company to change to a new digital operating model, and that model is how your company will create new value and new competitive positioning. But digital operations and technologies are still new and evolving quickly, and the business world lacks 10-20 years of experience and benchmarking data that could help your company determine the effectiveness of your platform’s performance. This is one of the reasons so many initiatives fail. To avoid that risk, let’s look at how to understand whether your digital platform will deliver your intended outcome.
Start by understanding what your company wants its digital platform to do. The goal is to ensure the platform’s work delivers a better experience for the people who use the platform – customers, employees, and ecosystem partners. Platforms do a lot of jobs, but not all those jobs are equally important. When building your platform – and when creating metrics that measure what it delivers – you must design for the “moments that matter,” the most important jobs the platform will perform.
UNDERSTANDING THE MOMENTS THAT MATTER
The moment that matters will differ, depending upon the type of user and the context of those users’ responsibilities and what they use the platform to do.
As an example, let’s look at the moment that matters for a customer – the important job in a digital platform dealing with the revenue cycle and reimbursements for a hospital. What matters most to the hospital is that it gets reimbursement for all that it’s entitled to, and in a timely manner. There are a lot of other jobs the platform must do to support that important moment; but from the hospital’s point of view, that’s the important job, or moment that matters, is getting paid on time and in full.
Another example is an HR digital platform that performs important jobs related to employees, such as tasks related to joining the company, transferring roles within the company, having a child, anything related to payroll, or leaving the company. In this case, the users are employees, and the moments that matter is that they are paid accurately and on time, or the onboarding or transfer to a different role in the company goes smoothly.
Important jobs are the things that the platform needs to get right for the user’s moment that matters – the things that not only need to happen but need to be performed extraordinarily well.
CREATING METRICS
Effective metrics apply to either an important job or a moment that matters. It’s a function of what needs to get done as well as the time it takes to do it. It describes either the moment that matters or the important job in terms of its desired result and the time it takes to accomplish that result.
For example, if your company’s customer is a hospital for which your platform handles revenue cycle billing, the metric might be whether your company fully collects everything the hospital is due and that it’s completed in 60 days.
The “important job” or “moment that matters” metric allows you to understand whether the entire platform is working effectively to deliver its business objective of a better employee, customer, or partner experience. Without tying the metric to the desired “moment that matters,” you’ll end up just measuring intermediate or component performances that may not collectively add up to the desired result.
In the context of any customer or employee service, there’s an amount of time the end-user will allow for the task to be fully (not partially) completed. If you understand the moment that matters, then you know what the full need is and how much time is available to capture that moment. Then your company can ensure it engineers a digital platform that fully delivers on those important jobs.
USER ADOPTION FACTOR
The moments that matter defines that the experience the platform must deliver to the end-users and, thus, where to pay particular attention when designing the digital platform. Why is this so important for every company? Because every company will implement digital platforms over the next few years. If they want the platform to be adopted by users, they must think about the people using them and make sure the platform delivers on the promise.
Keep in mind that digital platforms cut across multiple departments and often across multiple companies. They have separate interests and differing ideas on the use of a platform. This makes it even more important to focus on what’s important to the end-users since the users’ adoption of the platform will impact the success of your transformation.
When users adopt the platform, it lessens resistance to the amount of organizational change that is required for a new operating model. So often, that resistance defeats a digital transformation.
Many companies make the mistake of starting by acquiring the technology they hope will deliver on the powerful promises of digital and change their competitive positioning. A better path – the most successful path – is to define the moments that matter to users when they use the platform, establish a way to measure whether it happens, and then select the right technology that will support those moments and important jobs. Your company will spend much less time and money on its digital platform and undertaking organizational change if you follow this path.
originally posted on Forbes.com by Peter Bendor-Samuel
