Driving digitalisation: The view from a Digital Opportunity Lead

Businesses been forced to adapt rapidly to new digital ways of working over the last two years but accelerating the transformation will become critical to their future survival and success.

According to a report by McKinsey, nine out of ten companies will need to change their business model to make it more economically viable by 2023. Within this, 64% will need to create new digital business(es) during that time.¹

Leaders must now lay out a clear path for the digital future of their businesses. And this must shift their digital approach from reactive implementation to a proactive platform that empowers their teams to achieve more.

Getting there is easier said than done. But, according to Carl Abernethy, Digital Opportunity Lead for Shell, companies will quickly see the impact of effective digital tools spread throughout different business functions – providing they have the correct foundations in place.

To make sure the tools delivered value, the LSC Digitalisation product team adopted a customer centric approach.

“We really started to change the way we worked by always putting the customer first,” Abernethy explains. “So, in our team specifically, it was all about saying, ‘OK, where are your pain points and how can we support you?’ From there, we were able to create a prioritised backlog of value-adding items helping to deliver widely adopted solutions.”

One of the major benefits that this mindset shift unlocked was the ability to deliver an initial solution much quicker than ever before.

“Previously, digital products had taken up to one year to create and scale out to the full user base. Numerous reasons such as delivery methodology, lack of a data platform, legacy or process-heavy deployment had all accumulated to slow delivery,” says Abernethy. “However, recent similarly sized products have been delivered in just a few months to the full user base. This is followed by smaller frequent releases helping to get rapid feedback and allowing us to react to possible changes in requirements. That way, the tools start to deliver value – even if initially it’s only an aspect of the original request.”

This doesn’t mean that there won’t be further change. Each company’s digital mindset will evolve constantly – a process that will continue as more people embrace new ways of working.

As well as getting their people and processes ready for further digitalisation, organisations need to make sure their new digital tools have the right information to work with. They need a trusted data layer to fuel the digital processes and drive effective decision making.

“The data layer is one of the key foundations to any digital product,” Abernethy explains. “Once you have that foundation in place, you could give the business access to the data layer – allowing them to tap into the data for themselves. So, it becomes a balance between delivering a digital product to them or allowing them to explore to get their own insights out of the information.”

Even with the right people, processes and data in place, it can be a challenge to avoid duplicated digital products across different business functions – something that will definitely slow down the pace of digitalisation.

For Abernethy, engaging with each function to understand their needs within the context of the wider digital ecosystem is often a useful first step.

“If a new idea comes in from the business, it may well be that we realise there’s overlap with existing tools in our portfolio or the data foundation is already in place within our data platform,” he explains. “This provides us with situations where the effort to deliver a new solution is low, but the value is huge. And the more we can do that – the more we have that overlap – the better.”

Within Shell, new opportunities are collected by a process that Abernethy refers to as a funnel of opportunities, with each idea being grouped under the LSC operations of Plan, Source, Make, Deliver. It’s a concept where ideas and digital tools are categorised to give visibility of what already exists within the business – and what might prove to be useful when applied to another function.

“All of our products sit in one (or more) of these four pillars, which gives us an overview of how they complement each other and support the supply chain,” says Abernethy. “By having this visibility, we can clearly see what products could be extended to meet the different needs of each business function. And this only increases the pace at which we can develop and deliver new tools.”

In the future, Abernethy also sees companies taking an even bigger step that will further accelerate their digital journeys. Where they’re currently able to reuse and expand existing tools across different business functions, organisations can adopt a Low Code No Code approach where colleagues are able to create their own solutions quickly and effectively.

“This gives people the ability to replace tasks and functions that are repetitive and time-consuming but are potentially too small in value to put a product team on,” he says. “With the right framework and handrails in place, any individual in the business can become a citizen data engineer and be part of the overall acceleration of digitalisation.”

The move to embed a Low Code No Code approach shows what an organisation can aim for with the right digital foundations in place. Accelerating digitalisation then becomes less about how your business keeps up with the competition and more about the opportunities it can unlock to give you an advantage.

¹ _{McKinsey. “The new digital edge: Rethinking strategy for the post pandemic era.” mckinsey.com. 2021.}