(This article was originally published at the MEGA Blog.)
In Poetics, Aristotle said that: ‘A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end’. Such plot structure prevailed until Horace advocated a five-act structure in Ars Poetica. Dramatists were experimenting a lot with other structures, but it wasn’t until the German playwright and novelist Gustav Freytag created his pyramid presenting different parts of the story (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution), that the art of story-telling became a science. Your business’s Digital Transformation Story starts right there.
Let’s begin with our company’s exposition. By establishing visibility into our assets and the processes (activities) that drive our business, we can create an in-depth assessment of our business ecosystem, ensure business and IT operations are driving toward the same goals, and provide insight to executives and stakeholders to improve decision-making and strategic planning.
Of course all stakeholders will be eagerly anticipating rising action within the company. To achieve this, we’ll want to create a detailed plan of the company’s transformation, involving an assessment of the digital skills that will be required to drive innovation. Another benefit to this increased visibility will be an expanded tolerance for risk-taking that is necessary to foster creativity in forward-thinking organizations.
This will lead to our climax (… which is always exciting!), which will be reached by reconciling new technologies with existing ones, improving customer engagement (and hopefully loyalty), increasing collaboration with partners, and expediting employee mastery of new skills and technologies. If leveraged correctly, data-driven decisions will allow us to better anticipate market needs and be where the customers expect us to be before the competition gets there, resulting in revenue growth.
The falling action will be a welcome reprieve from the chaos that can come with digital transformation. Our team will no longer be stressed about “do we have enough of this?” and “are we ready for that?” and “how are we going to get there?” Instead, we’ll have best-practices assigned to all of our business processes, we’ll have reconciled our digital and legacy technologies to be ready for growth, and our executives will have established a strategic roadmap that allows for the navigation of risks and ensures the business can achieve strategic goals.
As the pages of our story turn, we now have a legion of motivated & engaged employees, partners and customers - the final resolution of our transformation.
Most current approaches to enterprise architecture describe everything in terms of structure. IT infrastructures, however, are still being built through a fragmented approach – leaving the story behind. A well developed and executed IT plan will ensure the right technology is implemented, improving customer satisfaction results, meeting company needs and most of all – avoiding the drama associated with digital transformation, such as the pace of change, lack of vision or problems associated with old technology. Each piece of our story will now have the necessary context to finally make sense as part of the big picture.
Freytag’s Pyramid applies not only to five-act-plays, but also to short stories, novels, and any story worth telling. Our software solutions designed to help drive business and IT transformation will help you to structure your story so that it’s tailored to your enterprise landscape.
So, what’s your story?
In September 2015, Softtek and MEGA International signed a strategic partnership agreement to help companies succeed in strategic transformation. To read more blogs about digital transformation, visit MEGA’s blog.
About MEGA
MEGA is a global software firm helping companies manage complexity through the use of enterprise architecture and IT portfolio management solutions. Executives gain the visibility and get the information they need to make the right choices for effective governance, and for striking the right balance between capacity for innovation, cost optimization, and risk management. With growing the business and innovation being priorities for CIOs, MEGA helps you clean up and stabilize your technical landscape to free up budget and establish a solid foundation for digitalization. We create software that supports your digital transformation efforts by helping you rationalize your application portfolio, manage your business capability evolution, and improve your customer experience.
