What is digital transformation? (CXOTalk #362)

Digital

transformation

is one of the most important topics in business today. We're talking to Joe Atkinson. He is the chief

digital

officer of PwC. Give us an idea of ​​

what

PwC is and where your focus is as a company. PwC is a great brand. Hopefully, a lot of people know us. Professional services organization providing security in our capital markets, providing tax advice and compliance services, and professional consulting and advisory services for companies you know well. The top 500 companies are part of our customer base and of course also from around the world. We've been in business for 170 years, we're still changing, and I think we're going to talk a lot about how we've been changing in this discussion.

Joe, give us an idea of ​​the scale of PwC. We are approximately 50,000 people in the US and just over 0.5 million people worldwide; We're actually now 275,000 people worldwide, so we just have a very, very large footprint in terms of people. Globally, let's call it $45 billion in revenue growing towards $50 billion. If you think about our scale as a private company, we are a pretty large organization. When we talk about

digital

transformation

at scale, that's

what

we talk about when we talk about PwC. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about how to bring all of those people, starting with our colleagues in the US, the 50,000 people here in the US.

How do we bring all of our people and the 225,000 colleagues that they have around the world in this travel with us? You are the digital director. What does that role entail? This role was really created because we recognized that technology was driving a pace of change that we all see. Everyone on this webcast sees that pace of change. But it was also a challenge to our people, and it was a challenge to our people in new ways. We were watching technology develop in such a way that the pace was overwhelming for some of our employees. It was certainly overwhelming for some of our clients.

At the same time, our people asked us for much more commitment. They wanted a better technological experience on a daily basis. Our clients asked us for the same thing. They wanted more value. They want more quality as our clients have always expected from us, but they wanted service delivery in a more technological way. Of course, they want us to manage our costs and think about how our delivery cost connects to their efforts to manage their costs and footprint. All of those pressures, our people, the pace of change, what the expectations were in the market, not just among customers, but among regulators, stakeholders, and we saw this opportunity to say we really needed to up our game. way we were. equip our people and take them on that journey of transformation.

Help us understand what it really means. I sometimes say that it may be the most used term in business of our time. We could probably go back 20 years and choose what those were. Digital can be ours. One of the dangers, Michael, when it comes to digital transformation, is that it means a lot of different things to different people. Sometimes, frankly, those things don't mean anything at all in the way work is done or the way customers are served or the way businesses are built. For us, it was very much about how to change the way work is done.

How do we change our customers' experience? It wasn't just to make it look digital. It wasn't about branding, positioning or even channels. It was really about whether we could do work in more innovative ways. Can we deliver work more efficiently? How do we unleash the power of an incredible talent pool of more than 270,000 people around the world so they can help us do this in an even more constructive way? For us, it was very much about work we've done in some places for a long time and new work in other places, but how do we rethink that work and do it in a different way?

It's quite an interesting notion to say that digital transformation is about doing work in a new way. Is this uniquely true for PwC because it is a professional services firm or do you think digital transformation, broadly speaking, is about changing the way we work? I'm biased in the question, right? I really think that at its core, if digital transformation is not about the way we work, then, frankly, I'm not sure what it is because there are a lot of distractions that can be had about emerging technologies and what those technologies mean. Everyone who has ever run a large-scale organization knows that you can plug a technology into the environment and not make any changes to the way people work and, frankly, disrupt things even more and not get the business results you expect. are sought.

For us, the best business results should be about getting work done in different ways. When we talk to clients, I have the great privilege of talking to many of our clients around the world. That is your challenge. They're trying to figure out how to turn digital transformation, their transformation journey from the bumper sticker level or the buzzword level into real, lasting change in the organization. They're getting that pressure just like us. They get that pressure from their clients and customers, they get that pressure from people back home, and they get that pressure from people who want to be part of their organizations.

Joe, you mentioned business results. If we try to find a common denominator for digital transformation, is that the key? I think it has to be like that. If you look at the trend line from a technology perspective, there are better visionaries than me who could tell us where we will be in 10 or 15 years. The reality for most executives I've spoken to is that they're trying to figure out how to get from where they are today to, frankly, navigate the next three to five years. Everyone has their favorite phraseology and expert opinion on how quickly technology is driving change.

But if you believe what has been said that the change in technology and the way we work has been greater in the last 20 years than in the previous 200 combined, then today's executives actually face one of the most incredible challenges any executive has ever had. never faced in history. They have to figure out how to keep their people, their services, and their products relevant, and they have to do it while still having to deliver results to whoever their stakeholders are, whether they are a private or public company. one. If you're having a conversation about digital and you're not connecting the dots and saying, "Okay, what are the business outcomes that I want?

Of course, I want happier people, I want to retain more talent, I want to deliver things more efficiently "I want happier customers and I want more cost-effectiveness in my delivery chain," if that's not part of the conversation, my advice to customers would be, "Take a step back and really think about what you're looking for and why it's This is different if we use the generic term "business transformation", because you're talking about business outcomes, different ways of working and what you're not talking about is, well, let's buy new software with different features I think business transformation and digital transformation? , the way we've talked about it for the last 20 years, I think they are intertwined.

It doesn't mean that you shouldn't buy software and implement new solutions and capabilities. There are places where that pace of technology brings incredible benefits in terms of new cloud-based technologies. If we look at the pace at which we can change enterprise resource planning systems, large-scale financial systems, and operational systems, the cloud unlocks a speed in the deployment of these technologies that is very different than what we have faced in the last 20 years. years before, so they go hand in hand. For me, the challenge is that if you're having a conversation about digital because you want to talk about how it's positioned or you want to talk about how it's seen in the marketplace, that's a marketing conversation.

It's important, but it's a marketing conversation. If you're really talking about, "How do I deliver this product and delight a customer in a very different way? How can I remove the grinding gears from my customer experience, from my customer experience, or from experience and momentum?" of my people?" A different business outcome because I freed up their time and capacity?" To me, that's the current business transformation we're all talking about as digital transformation. Can you elaborate on that distinction? On the one hand, we're talking about business impact. operations, impact on processes, change in the way we do business.

Then you made the distinction between the marketing discussion and digital transformation Michael, I know you've had great marketing executives, so I don't want to steal the lines from either. of the big marketing executives. They know this space much better than I do. If you look at the way we try to have an engaged discussion with consumers, for us it is a B2B discussion. In the B2B space, customers want to know that. you have the advantage from a technology perspective, and that's a really important marketing discussion. It's a really important dialogue with your customers, but you have to support it.

If I make a promise from a technology experience perspective and tell a customer, "We're going to give you a much more data-rich and insightful experience because we're applying technology in new ways," and then I don't do it. Hand that over, I've done the worst of all the worlds. I have made a promise to the market that I have not kept. I think it's very important to understand how they fit together. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In fact, they fit together in a really powerful way. Our advice would be to make sure that the business process and results are working correctly and that you are making really good progress.

Then, start that dialogue with your consumer. Is it fair to say that operations? We're kind of going through a lot of different areas. Is changing operations the basis or essence of this? I always talk about it in the context of people and technology. Maybe an example will help. The other day we were talking to a team that was talking to a client who is in the financial services space. They have to do damage assessments after the fires. It turns out that it is actually a very dangerous exercise because there are people who have to go in and watch.

The building may still be damaged or whatever. The team is now applying drone technology to be able to conduct those initial assessments. After that idea hits the table, you'd say, "Well, of course, that makes a lot of sense," but someone has to be the team that says, "Hey, wait a minute. There's a different way to assess this damage with The technology and can we use drone technology? There may be different technologies in the future and there will definitely be different technologies in the future. For us, we often talk about that, how do I create the insight, the mindset that makes someone think. : "I've done this the same way, or I could apply the way I've done something for a long time to this new thing, but what do I really need to do is apply a new technology to this to do it?" a different way." That requires a few things.

If I didn't know that a drone existed or if I didn't know that drones were being deployed commercially on a large scale, then I would never consider how they could help me in that situation. Of course, we have large enterprise customers deploying drones in surprising ways. If I didn't know what blockchain could do to help solve trust in my system, I might never consider it to help apply it to a particular problem. For me, our effort among all of our people is: How do I open their mindset? How can I give them enough education and perspective on those technologies so that they can start thinking about how they are applied to solve a problem?

I don't need them to be; we certainly have some, but I don't need them to be the firm's drone expert or the Ph.D. in analytics, but I need them to say, "You know what? There's a better way to do it and there's better technology to help me do it." We have a Twitter comment from Arsalan Khan that says: "One myth we hear is that digital transformation doesn't affect culture and are there other myths?" Let's talk about culture and then I'll ask you about other digital transformation myths that may exist. I suspect the best part about having conversations like this is that if you line up five or ten of us as chief digital officers, Michael, you might get five or ten different answers because this area is so dynamic.

My opinion is that digital has to do with culture. It's at the heart of what we're talking about because if I can't connect it to the way people solve problems and work in teams, if I can't connect it to the waywhere they are willing to take risks to solve a problem differently, if I can't empower them to apply a technology in a way that they're not even sure is going to work and that their supervisor has to accept or their manager, director, partner, whoever is supervising they have to accept, that acceptance of risk taking, I'm going to apply technology in a new way, any of us who have managed large scale teams know that that doesn't happen because you tell everyone that take risks.

This is because, at the heart of the team, there is a culture of trust, integrity, doing the right thing and seeking the right answer that allows the team to take those types of risks. I think if that is a myth, one vote from my seat. It's about culture. I think the other myth is that everything has to do with technology. This clearly goes back to the cultural point. Our people, one of the things we're really proud of is that we made the decision early that we were not going to selectively enhance the capabilities of our people.

We were not going to make these capabilities, skills and knowledge available only to people who we thought would definitely need them. We wanted to make this capacity and ability available to all of our people so that they could work on a journey that took them wherever their career took them, whether with us or anywhere, working with our clients, working in the community. , working at a non-profit, doing a startup. For me, that commitment is about recognizing that digital transformation, at its core, is about people. Technology is changing. We know that technology is going to change. The best technology any of us can apply to a problem today will be different five years from now.

If you go all in on what technology is without helping people adapt to that pace of change in technology, then we think we're really missing something and that's why we started with all our people. We started with this discussion about technology and ended with the question: How do we get people to take risks and have integrity? What is the connection? Why does digital transformation rely on these pieces of culture and people, rather than needing different technology? If you think about this idea of, I'm going to train everyone and help them have a broader perspective on the application of technology, first, I have to help them understand what technologies are.

Secondly, I have to invest in training them in the application of those technologies. I can't just say, "Hey, here's the tech. You should meet them." That is insight and awareness. It's important, but I have to immerse them in the technology. For us, it was all about data because a lot of our work, when we work with clients, we exchange large amounts of data. We are carrying out analysis on financial transactions. We are conducting analyzes on capital deployments. We are conducting analysis on operational performance, supply chains and customers. We are dealing with massive amounts of data from huge global companies.

We knew we needed people to be better with data, so we invested a lot of time, effort, and money into training our people to use data skills. But we also said these are the data skills we're looking for, so we gave them a framework around what we were asking for so they could direct their energies to the right place. Then we apply what I affectionately call our accelerators, our type of catalyst to the mix. We took 2,000 of our people. By the end of this year, there will be 2,000 of our people. We asked them to take a deep dive into the technology to really take advantage of it.

We put them on essentially two-year tours, protected some of their time for them to learn, and tasked them with going out, interacting with the teams, helping them apply the new skills they have, and helping them be the catalyst. that everyone wants to be to change the way work is done. Here is the example. In that environment, frankly, I didn't know exactly what our people would do. We call it Citizen-Led Development. It is this innovation that our teams innovate around. One of the most successful innovations that we started with, we've had many since then, but one that got a lot of attention from the beginning is that we had a senior associate who was a few years into his career, a senior associate who actually came into our time reporting system.

We are a time management system. We run time reports to ensure we are transparent and accountable to clients and our own time. None of our people like that process. It is not a fun process. No one is excited to do that, so they created a bot, a desktop robot that helped them pull information from the systems the team was using on that particular account and auto-populate the company's time reporting system. There's not a lot of science there, but it was a pain point for our team that, with new tools, they were able to look and say, "I'm going to look for that.

I'm going to fix that." We think, on average, that probably saves each of our staff 10 or 15 minutes a week, 50,000 people at scale. The most important lesson from my perspective as an executive was that if the team had sent me a memo or submitted a funding request to say, "I want to optimize the time reporting system," I would have said, "We." I've had the same reporting system forever. It works well. That's not where I'm going to deploy limited capital to change a system." Instead, they deployed their intellectual capital. They took the tools we had put in their hands.

They applied it to the problem. Now we have a more efficient process. We have no need The customer sees the exact information they should and the team is a little less frustrated with something they don't like that doesn't allow them to serve customers in a meaningful way. That's the kind of thing we're really looking for. How do I connect that type of problem solving so that our people feel ownership of those weak points in the process, whether they are ours or our clients? They pursue them with the technological tools that we put in their hands. So what is the difference between them? two scenarios, on the one hand, this citizen-led approach versus someone coming to you and saying, "Hey, we need to change the time system," and obviously there's no reason to do it because it works?

We often talk about the transformation in two columns. If you think about citizen initiative as, how can I ultimately empower us, 270,000-plus people, there's also an element of business-led transformation. I would say enterprise-driven transformation, for those of us who have been in this space for years, I will characterize it as traditional large-scale transformation. What we know about this and we have all experienced it is the top-down, large-scale business transformation, including the deployment of big technologies, that those deployments eventually reached a point where change stops and can stagnate. Stop, stop, fight - choose your word. You can describe it however you want.

One client described it as the permafrost layer of his organization. Another client gave me a really important insight. They said, "Joe, we always say in general terms that people resist change. They don't actually resist change. They just have to understand the net benefit of change. If you ask them to take the risk of doing something, different, "They need to understand that there are advantages for them, their teams and the people they care about on the ground." Business-driven transformation can take you a long way. On the other hand, our citizen-led transformation, Michael, if I gave everyone tools and told them to do whatever they wanted on any given day to innovate, you would get some really interesting things that would impact business and you would get a lot of things. which are probably really interesting but may not affect the business.

For us, that combination of business leadership plus citizen leadership has created this wonderful saturation of strategy across the company, so that I'm really getting change at every level. We talk a lot about transformation on a massive scale. I firmly believe that if we hadn't attacked it from both angles we probably would have made some progress, some good progress, but I don't think we would have made the progress that we have made. It has been alluding to its broader digital transformation strategy. Can you be a little more explicit now? What was the problem you set out to solve and the plan you put in place?

I'll start with customer pressures because that was the problem we started to solve. What did our clients tell us about what they expected from us? I always joke; They expect more value and higher quality. I've been looking my entire career for the client who says, "Take it down a notch. You killed it last year and we want less of you next year." I never found that client and, frankly, I hope I never find him. They always ask us to raise the bar. Then they say, "I don't want to be served the way I've always been served.

No more big piles of materials. No more heavy reporting that, frankly, half the teams don't read." Stop analyzing data I can't understand. Give me a much more technology-based experience." By the way, team, if it's in our interest, you have to manage your costs. How do you do that? That was the business problem we were trying to solve. For us, relevance is about efficiency. It's about removing worthless hours from that equation so that people can provide that information in a more valuable and faster way. It's also about how we tell stories. I'll come back to the idea that a lot of what.

What we do is data-centric, so we needed to equip people not only with the tools to quickly ingest, discuss, and clean that data, but we also needed to give them the tools to help visualize that data at a glance. scale, so we provide visualization technology to every one of our people in the U.S. Everyone has it. They can share the visualizations directly with the clients. They can share dynamic visualizations with those clients. They can collaborate with customers on how those things work. That's a very different experience for our customers and that again reflects those pressures that our customers told us about.

They said they wanted a different experience. My view, and that of our leadership team, is that if we do not continue to change at pace, we will risk our own relevance. We risk our relevance to our customers and that is the customer side. Michael, the other responsibility that I feel every day I wake up and every night I put my head on the pillow is that we have, in the United States, 50,000 people who are counting on us to do this right; worldwide, more than 270,000. Those 270,000 people expect us to help them overcome this situation. That's a matter of skills, right?

That was the other problem we were looking to solve. For a long time, our profession had been quite comfortable bringing in people and asking them to work until midnight, reviewing data in spreadsheets and just working, working, working, working, working. When I asked our people how much of that work was really valuable to them, whether they were learning, they were growing, they were delivering value, it wasn't as much as we would like. Obviously, it's also about value for customers. My goal is, I want people's jobs/lives. We talk a lot about work-life balance and we all know it's all about work-life integration now, but I want to get you out of the office.

I want them to be unlocked that time. Whether they direct that time toward their personal activities or toward different value for customers, as long as we drive those outcomes with customers, that's what our customers expect from us. They don't count our value in hours. They count our value on business outcomes, so it's about focusing our people's attention and energy on those business outcomes. You mentioned something I'd like to elaborate on, which is that you had started saying the word "storytelling." You were talking about data and visualization tools. What is the role and importance of storytelling and communication in this entire process?

We all live in a world where there is too much data. There is not enough information. We know the buzzwords about it. What I would offer is that because there is so much data and it is so accessible, part of the challenge is that you can tell any story you want with data. I think we all recognize that if you give me enough data, I will shape it. What we saw in the past is that customers, and sometimes ourselves, were making decisions confirmed by data. I mean, we trust our instinct and our intuition because that's how we get to be wherever we are, so I'm going to make a decision.

By the way,I want to do it with the data, so here is the decision. Could you get me a bunch of data to make sure I'm right? We're challenging people to change that completely and really let the data tell the story, inform the decision. There's a role for intuition and instinct there, certainly, but it's about responsibly telling stories with data and crafting a story that people can understand. I can put a thousand lines of a spreadsheet on a conference room video screen and I promise you that no one will make an intelligent decision based on a thousand lines of a spreadsheet in a conference room.

But if I can help people understand, for example, what their customers see in certain zip codes, in certain stores, if I can visualize that in a way that makes the mind think and avoid it more quickly, then I can equip people to feel more comfortable moving that decision tree to the data analytics level rather than just having data analytics do the validation on the back end. For us, there's a huge element of trust and integrity there, right? I keep coming back to these. They are so powerful in our brands. In our brand, that trust and integrity are paramount, so I really want to make sure that all of our people are thinking about the implications of how I collect and tell a story with data because it's so important in today's society.

We have another Twitter comment from Arsalan Khan, who picked up on a comment you made earlier about data and bots. He is asking a question about your internal processes. We'll see how comfortable you are with answering this. He says, "How do you capture lessons learned from customer interactions and turn that information into robots so they can be useful in their next interaction?" He wonders about your internal processes. I mentioned that we gave everyone visualization tools. We've also trained over 30,000 of our people in the US and are now taking it around the world. Thirty thousand of our people in the US have been trained in building bots.

For those of you who are deep into technology, I'm going to characterize this as desktop robots or task robots versus business robots, so call them desktop robots where I have tasks on my desktop that I want to automate in a more meaningful way. . What we have done is created a sharing platform where we can take those bots. If a team in Philadelphia develops a great way to address a customer or company's problem with a bot, we have a sharing platform that is essentially an internal marketplace where they can submit that bot. They can present documentation; This is what it does and this is why it works.

We have a healing process behind that. That robot can then be distributed to over 50,000 people in the US. We just rolled out this capability in the UK. It will soon reach other territories. That ability allows us to scale those little bits of intellectual property in ways that, frankly, were never possible before. You have this ability to take automations and scale them. By the way, we do the same with data models. We do the same with visualizations and other digital assets that people are creating. From the lessons learned and how we take that intellectual property perspective, the trend we are seeing is much more collaborative communication online.

Obviously, that's not a new trend. The way our people work together, the comfort level they have creating chat rooms to serve individual clients, creating chat rooms that share ideas about certain industries, respecting everyone's data protection and all that good stuff, but the way our teams can collaborate. It is now dramatically different than it was five years ago. Deploying those tools at scale, along with the ability to share at scale, that combination has been very, very powerful for us. Knowledge capture and collaboration are as important today, if not more so, than they were historically. I know, historically, it's always been very important.

If you think about where we are in terms of what our people expect when they come to us, we hire people at all stages of their career. Everyone thinks of us as a place where they can start their career and we are a great place to start your career. We're hiring people who are at all stages of their careers and who have done amazing things. When we incorporate that talent, part of the idea is: how do we share it? How do we share that IP with everyone? It doesn't make everyone an expert, but the accessibility of that intellectual property is, frankly, what our clients expect from us.

If you go to that person who says, "I used to spend a portion of my time doing something that was repetitive, so repetitive that I could build a desktop robot to solve the problem," that opens up our brainpower. It opens up value capability that we can now redirect to customers to, frankly, solve for what they hired us to do in the first place. Then the talent we're bringing in looks at that and says, "Well, you're actually tapping into the reason I came here in the first place, because I didn't come here to do that repetitive thing that I can automatically automate." bot." The difference that I think has been so powerful for us is before people came in.

We are in the customer service business. If a customer asks us to do it, we will do it. Not everyone had the skills, the tools, the ability to figure out how can I get some of that out so I can get to the things that are really valuable to the client, to the team, and to the team behind me Now, we've expanded those skills and we're collaborating so that people. can take advantage of them. The nature of the type of consulting that is done is also affected and, ideally, also enhanced by this type of transformation and collaboration.

Absolutely one of the most fun privileged parts of my job is that I am often asked. who spend time with our clients' senior management, boards, and executive teams about how we think about transformation. I've been in consulting my entire career, or at least 26 of my 27 years, often going to a client and dealing. to discover how to solve the problem on your plate. In this case, we all share the same problem. We're all trying to figure out how to adapt and drive this technology and innovation at scale, so we've been sharing the story with customers across the country.

What's been really fun is that it's shaping the way we think about business opportunities in those markets, the way we think about how we can help customers with the right technology and tools, and in some cases, how we could take technology and tools that were originally created for us and market them to the market to help our customers do the same thing we have done for ourselves. Let's talk about measurements and metrics. Well, you're doing all these things. How do you know when you're successful and do you ever reach a point where you say, "We're done"?

There are days when I wake up in the morning and look for that point where we are done. I haven't found it yet. I know our president hasn't found it yet, as we continue to work on the agenda. I really love that part a lot. Let's talk about how we measure because I think there are a couple of dimensions. I want to start with people because if we believe what we say about people being the heart of our transformation, then the question is: are our people seeing what we would expect to see? I would share two things.

I mentioned this force of 2,000 digital accelerators. One of the things that's been surprising is that among that population of people, our retention of that talent is actually about twice that of the peer group who aren't in that program. If you think about it intellectually, and we spend a lot of time worrying about it, there's a part of you that says, "If I train people in those skills, these skills are hot in the market, I'm going to If you give them all these skills, They will make it." What we have discovered is that the mission and purpose that we have given them helps us change the company, to be advocates for change, to be advocates to their peers to help them change.

That is resonating. Again, these are people at all stages of their career. That's resonating with that population of people and they stay with us because they enjoy the journey. That's a really important measure. The other important measure I'll now turn to is: do our large-scale people feel comfortable knowing they have the tools and ability to innovate? Like many organisations, we survey our people every year. We've had the privilege of being a part of the Great Place to Work studies and we've had a lot of external recognition for that, but we look at that data and we look at it very closely every year to figure out where we can improve and continue to drive the experience.

This year, when we asked our people if they had the ability to innovate at work as we navigated this journey, that measure moved up nearly 19 points, which is one of the biggest moves we've ever seen at any time of the year. the study. These are people who tell us, "We don't have it all right yet, but we feel the power of what you're doing and you're giving us new tools and skills." From a people's perspective, we feel very good about that. Now let's talk about how we are a business. We are a private company. We are a business.

We need to drive growth, innovation like everyone else does, and profitability. What we're seeing is that, because we're automating a lot of the activity that doesn't have higher value in the market, our profitability is actually seeing the impact of that. That's the value of an individual in terms of revenue per professional and some of the measures that a professional services firm would be really familiar with. We're watching them very, very closely because we want to make sure that we're converting this activity into the business results that we would expect to see in the market. So far, and getting back to your point, I don't think I'll ever claim victory, maybe at my retirement party, but so far we're seeing movement on those measures that really encourages us that this will drive the return on investment that we would expect.

Profitability is driven by many different factors. How can you isolate yourself? We definitely cannot isolate ourselves. I wouldn't want to suggest to anyone that they can isolate; You know this factor affects this. In fact, one of the most challenging but truly exhilarating parts of our transformation journey is that we think of it as a portfolio. I often tell our partners and our leadership team; I would like to tell you and choose the amount of assets we have. We have all kinds of learning resources, technology tools and software products that we have taken from abroad to help drive this.

We have all kinds of assets that we've bought and built, etc., to help drive this. I would love to tell you that I can calculate exactly what the moving percentage point allocation is on any issue, but I can't. What I do know and am very confident about is that the portfolio of that impact is driving the results we want. I really encourage clients to think about the impact portfolio. From time to time, you can isolate it based on engagement or utility of a particular asset and say that's not really what drives it, but we spend a lot more time thinking about engagement, application of skills, engagement with assets, the use of assets. than us, does this asset drive this particular outcome?

When we see the commitment, we are sure that it is contributing to that portfolio effect. I'll also go back to something we started the conversation about, Michael, which is that if you're not thinking about that portfolio of assets in the context of business results, then, frankly, you run the real risk of just being a really interesting side project. for someone and not something that is central and strategic for the business. One of the things that our president and our board did from the beginning, which was really impactful, was that they established a strategy that included, as a pillar, our digital transformation.

It's not something we're doing to help enable the strategy. It is not something that is a complement to the strategy. It does not come from the left side or the fifth floor to the strategy. It's in the strategy. It's the strategy. I tell our digital accelerators a lot: "If you're trying to understand the company's strategy, look to your left, look to your right because you are the power of our strategy." It's that enabling and, frankly, enabling, empowering our people and allowing them to do what we hire them to do and get out of their way when we need to do it.

What kind of changes did PwC need to make to undertake the digital transformation of its own business? There were a few things. One is that we had to take a hard look at our technology. Did we have the right technology? Had we standardized on the right platforms? were wedriving at the right scale? We had to look at all of our training and development programs. Did we really have the proper training and development? We had to reposition it. I often say that training and development went from being a facilitator to being at the front of the train because now it is everything.

That enablement, the technology environment and culture, the way our partners viewed our teams from a problem-solving perspective, those were all part of the pieces we looked at. Let's talk about the challenges or obstacles that organizations typically encounter when they want to undertake this type of transformation program that you have been describing. I think there is this issue of adversity for change. I think once you understand why people resist certain changes, it helps. Help them understand what you're looking for and people will generally go with you. That being said, I also think there are some people who just aren't ready to change for whatever reason.

Often people want to focus and figure out why those 10 people out of 100 didn't move with the change. I would advise you all day: "Focus on the 90s that get you where you are going and the 10s either come or they don't." Then the other thing I would say is don't let technology get in your way. Technology is complicated. It's hard. It is expensive. It is a very important part, obviously, of digital transformation, but it is one part, and it is doing that strategy well and standardizing it where possible. I often tell our leadership team, "Make what may be the same, be the same.

Personalize and tailor it when necessary to deliver that distinctive value to a customer." Do you think that in business, in general, there is confusion about the role of technology in digital transformation? Yes. Yes. I think people fight because it equates them. People struggle because they want to believe that you have made a massive investment in technology that will bring change. It is often possible, but it has to be done the right way. You have to be thinking about that user experience. How does it land? What is your day to day like? That's why a lot of what we're doing in human-centered design and some of these other things that we're really training people on is so important now because, to me, that's how you leverage the value of investments in technology.

Let me finish by asking you for advice that you can share with people in companies who are listening and are involved with digital transformation in one way or another. It's a tough road sometimes, so what advice can you share? Sometimes it is a difficult path. Again, I hope no one took away that we thought we had all the answers to all of this because we are working on it just like any other organization does. That said, when you look at this question, you'll see a million crashes. You're going to see a million problems. It's really no different than any other problem that executives have solved before, that is, you eliminate them one at a time.

You send the teams after them and you go after them. Obviously, this could happen in parallel in large, complex organizations, but you have to go after the problems and blockages. The other thing is that there is a great saying that we have all shared that perfect is the enemy of good enough. If you really want to promote large-scale change, you have to accept that the road will be difficult. If you're really going to drive technological innovation that's going to change people's experience, you have to accept that the first iteration of that classic agile type of thinking, that first iteration could be your minimum viable product and you have to move forward. from there.

That requires helping your people understand what is about to happen because otherwise they will contrast what is happening with the expectations they had in the previous model. These are not ping-pong tables. No. Who doesn't love a good ping-pong table, but it's a great point. The workspace and the environment really matter and you can involve people in creativity and all that, but people want to do good work. They want to do interesting work. They want to apply their skills to solve important problems. If you can unlock that, my experience and we are blessed with phenomenal people across the PwC world, my experience is that they will come along for the ride.

Is the fundamental key is to find those people who have an interest and a propensity that are willing and able to follow the path, identify them in the external and early stages and then expand from there? I think that's huge. Talent has always mattered. Talent still matters and will matter even more in the future. That understanding of who is really going to get me there, who is leaning in, who is taking the risk, who is taking others with them, who feels that natural desire to coach and develop the people around them? It's not about fear. Everyone talks about technological disruption and job replacement.

It's about doing our work differently in the face of all that disruption. I firmly believe that if we do that, we will take advantage of this technology and make things easier for people. That's good. We will make things more impactful for our customers, our clients and our colleagues. That's a great thing. In fact, we're going to add security to the people who operate and build that kind of capability instead of taking it away. I think it all comes down to inspiring our people. Well, what an interesting debate and unfortunately we are running out of time. I want to say a huge thank you to Joe Atkinson, Chief Digital Officer at PwC, for taking the time and sharing his knowledge and experience with us.

Joe, thank you very, very much. Michael, thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed it. Everyone, thanks for watching. Before you go, subscribe on YouTube and hit the subscribe button at the top of our website so you can subscribe to our newsletter. I hope you have a good day. Visit CXOTalk.com. We have great shows coming up. Take care of everyone. Bye bye.