The 'undercurrent of an organization' has a negative connotation, but that's unfair, according to Harm Olde. "It describes how professionals in the organization experience change. You have to address that. It goes deeper than management communication. You really need to engage in conversation with those people. You need to truly discuss what is going to change. People who develop the vision often have little insight into what a change means for those working on the content. But even professionals may struggle to grasp the paradigm shift that a major transformation ultimately represents. I have worked with consultants and BI specialists myself, so people who are more highly educated, and even for them, it was quite challenging. People need to experience it somewhat personally. What you see now with the automation of certain tasks is that it creates stress. And a negative undercurrent in an organization will greatly hinder you, even if people have good intentions."
How an organization handles profound changes is crucial. Olde sees another major upheaval occurring in the next seven to eight years. The digital transition that accelerated during the COVID-19 crisis, in his view, is nothing more than a technological catch-up of capabilities that have been available for at least ten years. "The digital transformation I envision revolves around autonomous processes. Let me give you an example. In customer service, there are thousands of people answering calls for large companies. These conversations are recorded and analyzed to understand what is being discussed. From this, chatbots emerged. However, a human answering the phone gets ideas during the conversation about how to proceed. The next step we are taking with artificial intelligence is for a speaking robot to conduct that conversation, with broader knowledge than a human can provide. In my view, that is real digital transformation, transforming the business process into a fully autonomous one."
These changes will occur in many organizations. The people affected by them find it daunting because they fear the consequences for their jobs. There is also debate about what such a revolution will do to human contact. "But this step is going to happen. It's necessary because soon we simply won't have enough people to do all that work. Whether it's in healthcare, telecommunications, or the financial sector."
Therefore, this transformation must proceed calmly, to facilitate discussion. "People quickly feel powerless in such situations. And powerlessness is the worst feeling you can have. If you want to alleviate that, you have to motivate people to learn something new. Everyone over 40 really needs to think about what they're going to do for the next 20 years. If you learn and develop, there's always a place for you. Young people will naturally go along with the transition. I expect that will work out well."
In the digital transition that is going to unfold in the coming years, data play a very important role. According to Olde, organizations still have a significant task ahead, particularly concerning the distribution of responsibilities over data. Over the past decades, IT has slowly infiltrated organizations, resulting in a lot of isolated automation with managers responsible for their own areas. This led to data silos that are inaccessible to the rest of the organization. In the digital transformation that has been underway in recent years, the focus has therefore been on centralizing data, for example, in data lakes. "By centralizing responsibility, theoretically anyone can contribute what they want. Priorities are managed through the budget. However, this leads to discussions. Essentially, sales or production, for example, should be able to set their own priorities. The knowledge resides in the organization's sectors. If you want to centralize that, it becomes a very lengthy process. So, we actually want the responsibility for priorities to lie with the business, allowing the product owner to align decisions about their product with their own sector."
Olde primarily refers to data related to the operational plane, necessary for daily operations. Additionally, it's useful to have data required for the analytical plane available to the rest of the organization. He isn't concerned about data quality and governance in such a distributed setting. "You establish contracts with the domains to provide what's needed for the rest of the organization. There remains a central power block that regulates computational governance and the data exchange platform. This ensures the quality meets standards and supports the various domains technically. And as I mentioned about business transformation: We really need to collectively prioritize it. Otherwise, the company risks falling behind in the competitive landscape. That's not what we want. So, it should be logical that we collaborate effectively."