b'Partner News Spring 2024 33CorporateOver three years ago we began our own four-phase digital transformation journey, its been challenging and required working with different teams, at different levels of maturity to develop the plans and build the momentum to achieve real outcomes. Our digital transformation journey has felt daunting and unscalable at times, but in the last year weve begun creating our digital threads and harnessing and exploiting our data. This has positively impacted our culture and our users experience, who now put data at the heart of their roles. Connecting disparate data sets through digital threads has enabled us to turn data into insights and insights into action.I believe AI will become ubiquitous in the years ahead, so helping our teams augment their roles with new AI tools will be critical. Moreover, excellent data governance and a thorough understanding of how to use these tools will underpin our ambitions. Through the process we applied, and the journey we found ourselves on, Id like to share my key takeaways:Think big, start small: with many activities, we began with a small proof of concept, which helped contextualise the scale of the journey ahead.Focus on end-to-end processes: map outjoined-up approach to using and exploitingFinal words: think big, work your end-to-end processes and the digitalit. All digital ecosystems share commontogether, make it happen: threads each one entails to help manage thechallenges, but I feel Defence faces threeI recently had the pleasure of sharing our scale of the task. critical ones: own digital transformation journey at DE&Ss Digital Engineering Conference. I thoroughly Transformation paradoxes: we learnt we1)Connectivity and sharing enjoyed the opportunity to share the needed to balance often-paradoxical forces: traditionally, Defences need to know ITThales experience and to also hear the UK security mentality has constrained dataMoDs clarity of thinking regarding its data Theres no digital exploitation withoutexploitation opportunities. This postureand digital strategies. Its also extremely governance, but no governance withoutis moving more towards need to share,reassuring to me that the MoD sees data as exploitation. but there are still technology and culturala strategic asset second only to people.Be evangelical about where youre going,challenges we need to overcome jointly.but sceptical about your maturity andAll transformation is difficult, and journey. 2)Treating data as an assetcollectively,collaboration is criticalwhether between Theres no transformation withoutwe need more focused data managementthe MoD and industry, across industry, or technology, but technology itself is notto ensure we maximise its value to users,across the Forcesyet, weve achieved transformation. through both excellent data governancesuccess by working together for a common Measure everything, but what reallyand by incentivising asset owners togoal in many areas and the MoDs capability counts are users and benefitsdemonstrate the value opportunity. centres are an opportunity to accelerate Get Executive sponsorship, but dontcollaboration. base your transformation on Executive3)Capacity and capabilityevery needs. industry faces a technical skills challenge,I strongly believe the foundations, direction, You need data champions to make thingsbut we need deep user/domain expertiseand collective will is there to create a data-happen, but its a team that sustains. to understand how to achieve impactfuldriven UK defence enterprise. One thats user outcomes. There are national skillssmarter, faster, and simpler and whichUltimately, to realise the operational edgeprogrammes, but its critical that thesealongside a call for data, data, datacan we know data can deliver, industry needs aexpand over the coming years. also deliver, deliver, deliver.'