In a landscape marked by volatile geopolitics (not to mention market conditions) and still bearing the scars of inflation and supply chain disruptions, businesses are reassessing their approach to digital initiatives. However, the need to keep up with the forward march of technology has not gone away, meaning that organisations today find themselves needing to balance innovation with prudence. Brian Herron, director at user experience (UX) design house Each&Other, said that a strategic shift is underway in how businesses approach digital transformation projects, with an emphasis on targeted interventions that deliver immediate value. Herron said this meant that it was important to remain intellectually flexible as the immediate future was unpredictable. “My views on things are evolving rapidly given what’s going on in the economy,” he said. “At the start of the year there was a lot of interest in the market for investment, going from enterprise-level thinking about really big things, focusing on what AI means, and getting past the ‘techcession’, to, at scale-ups and ambitious start-ups, people talking about investment. “Today, notes of caution have crept in,” he said. Which is not to say digital transformation has stalled. Indeed, in the face of a growing artificial intelligence (AI) onslaught, companies recognise that standing still isn’t an option as the competitive landscape is evolving quickly, with the threat of AI-enabled competitors a real concern. However, a growing trend of rebranding digital transformation as optimisation is perhaps useful, as it expresses the end goal more succinctly than the highfalutin’ term does. Herron said this reframing reflects a more nuanced understanding of what technology investment should achieve - tangible improvements to business processes. You don’t have to boil the ocean all at once; you can target in on problem areas, and you can solve real problems in relatively short amounts of time “We can think of digital transformation as a wholesale review of how organisations work and [then] embedding technology at every level. The next layer down would be app modernisation, looking at legacy systems and finding a way to replace them or parts of them,” he said. An example of this would be looking at how a database works and changing the back-end to build more modern services on top of it. Even something as seemingly straightforward as this demands some thought, Herron said. “The danger is one of replicating a bad paper-based journey, or even a digital journey you created some time ago, with a new bad process. You get the technology shift, but do you get the real rewards,” he said. A true digital transformation has a number of components, the first of which is a service-layer approach asking what are the processes, what are they doing, and are they good? Below that is workflow: is it as efficient as possible, can we automate it? The final thing is look and feel, the most visual layer, meaning does the technology interact in a way that feels modern and fresh. The results of a transformation can deliver significant efficiencies as well as improve user experience, Herron said. “The ultimate goal for these projects is to create better working practices, reduce the amount of human time spent on repetitive tasks. The goals of these processes, then, would mesh well with what companies would want to do if we were in recessionary times,” he said. However, waiting for perfect market conditions before investing in necessary technology upgrades is itself a risky strategy, according to Herron. “When you need to do something, you should do it, because the next thing to come along is unpredictable anyway,” he said. But doing something should not mean doing absolutely anything. Indeed, Herron said that the kind of research-based design thinking that UX agencies specialise in brings something specific to the table in digital transformation processes: a kind of North Star that allows organisations to properly chart their course. “Complicated projects have a tendency to drift and bloat, and they can even fail, so anything that de-risks that is good. That’s what UX is set up to do, to better understand user needs,” he said. Herron said this laser focus on user needs allows companies to achieve meaningful improvements with more modest investments, creating measurable wins rather than embarking on sprawling transformation initiatives that might never deliver their promised returns. “The investment that you planned in December or January still needs to happen – anything that gives you a better chance of user success seems to be the smart way to go,” he said. However, Herron said the key to success in the current climate is adopting an iterative approach that breaks larger transformation goals into more manageable pieces. “You don’t have to boil the ocean all at once; you can target problem areas and, with new technologies appearing, you can solve real problems in relatively short amounts of time,” he said.