The Blind Leading the Blind

Here, organisations are interdependent human-centred systems like companies, NGOs, adminstrations, clubs, etc. whose main purpose is not the development of software but who want to automate a significant portion of their daily activities with software.

Too often, software projects for these organisations:

• fail to achieve essential goals;
• are greatly delayed or even canceled;
• exceed budgets by factors of 2, 3 or even 10.

Most organisations are highly dependent on their IT-solution partners, or worse: on individual developers.

However, the root cause of this malaise is not any particular IT-solution partner or developer — it is the inherent immaturity of three essential factors:

• the software industry catering to these organisations;
• the organisations themselves;
• the collaboration between IT-solution partner and organisation.

Digital-Transformation Result (Source: [1])

This is a case of the blind leading the blind:

• organisations have not yet learnt to see and describe their subject matters and processes in a form that is both detailed and conclusive;
• IT-solution providers keep taking the responsibility of leading the organisation in their digital transformation even though they also lack a suitable methodology and tools;

As a consequence, the organisation and the IT-solution provider settle on a raw, peacemeal negotiation and implementation of individual system features without first creating a sound big picture at the process level (see below).

Digital-Transformation Setup

Building a Home like Software

Today, when a family wants to build a house to live in, there is an almost universal process with the following characteristics:

• an architect acts as the professional, trained intermediary between the family and the craftsmen;
• a trained draftsman drafts a number of carefully-aligned, precise and detailed blueprints;
• the blueprints are the source of truth for feasibility assessments, costs calculations, and 95% of the craftmen's work.

The following domain storytelling diagram [2] (short domain story) illustrates the process. Read the words along each arrow in the order of the numbers, e.g. «Familiy finds architect through a friend»:

The next domain-story diagram is an oversimplified analogy to a typical digital transformation of an organisation. However, it reflects quite well the basic methodology applied to digital-transformation scenarios:

Here, the characteristics ar:

• there is no professional no intermediary: the family interacts directly with the craftsmen (and vice versa);
• there are no up-front blueprints i.e. no «big picture»;
• one element of the house is described, negotiated and built at a time, then the result is evaluated.
• eventually, the house is finished without there ever being a picture of the house before.