GATE KEEPERS

These are the people who will approve the money, resources, policy changes, and strategy for the transformation. They usually ask a lot of challenging questions to prove that you have a good plan.

Gatekeepers are typically the CXOs, Board of Directors, Capital Budget Committee, other key-decision makers, and the support roles that are looked to by the main gate keepers (i.e. finance, legal, HR, etc.).

All of these people have the ability to give the go and no-go signal for your transformation.

EXPERTS 

These refer to the people within the organization who have the data or knowledge that will help guide and set the direction of your transformation. As you seek to define what it is going to be, the experts will have insight that your gatekeepers might not necessarily have.

• Customer Experts

People who are customer-facing that understand what your customers are looking for and what their points of pain are. Since digital transformations typically impact the customer journey and customer experience, you need people who intimately understand their needs and are able to advise you properly.

• Market Experts

People who understand what your competitors are doing and have knowledge about the other companies who would be able to support the kind of transformation you envision. These might include business development, distribution, or any other teams that have a general understanding of your market’s ecosystem.

• Product and Service Experts

These are people who understand the core product or service of your business. If you’re a hotel, they would be the people who understand how the hotel is operated. This typically includes operations, facilities, logistics, etc.

• Technology Experts

People who understand your current systems (mainframe or other types of legacy systems) and are able to gauge how much it would cost or if your transformation is possible in the first place. 

Since a digital transformation would more often than not involve technology, sometimes even introduce new technology to your business, you need someone who understands how practical it would be and what kind of risks it presents from a technology standpoint.

BUILDERS

These are the people who will be involved when creating the process, infrastructure, and design of the transformation.

You will typically need the IT experts and designers who will construct a new user experience, the marketers who will design the campaign to communicate your change, the training and operation folks who will need to create new documentation for the changes in the business processes related to the customer experience, the recruiters who will create plans on how to bring in the correct people to help support the transformation, and the list goes on.

OPERATORS

This involves everyone who will have to change the way they usually operate in order to deliver the new experience. Think about fulfillment, finance, legal, operations, marketing, sales, customer service, etc.

Every department will likely change in at least a minor way to accommodate the transformation. There might even be entirely new roles (like data scientists) that will open in order to execute the transformation vision.

When you look at your own organization and combine everyone who falls within each of these teams, by the time you reach the operators, you’re dealing with the vast majority of the people within the company. That’s because transformation involves everyone within the organization.

It is also important to involve all these four teams, or at least representatives of them, early on, to minimize their resistance to the change.