“The poorest digital transformation is the one that doesn’t happen.” Business objectives are constantly changing and this comment from Phil Tefler, CTO of ClearSkyLogic, reflects the increasing pressures on enterprises to keep up with shifting tides.

Companies sinking huge amounts of resources into failed projects are becoming common. And, for Edinburgh-based digital transformation agency ClearSky Logic’s CTO, as well its CEO, Darren Auld, there’re common themes that inform these failures.

The prevalent problem – and this applies to businesses of all shapes and sizes – is an over-eagerness to embrace technology, digitisation and the promised land that comes therein.

The issue is this is simply not how effective digital transformation happens. In our interview, Phil and Darren offer a measured take on the DT journey, discussing misconceptions and success stories in this space.

The Great DT Misconception

“The thing that has to transform isn’t your technology, it’s your business.”

So says Darren, and it’s a perfect encapsulation of the problems businesses face when starting their digital transformation journey – they start with the technology and not the tangible problems that are holding them back.

He adds: “When I’m talking to a new client, my first question is: What is holding your business back right now? They normally don’t say ‘I need a new mobile app’.”

Often, the problems lie in general scalability – companies seeking to take their business to the next level, and it’s there that you can start picking at specific areas where digitisation could be appropriate.

Darren continues: “Companies will say to me, things like ‘customer services has doubled in the last year, we’re running out of profitability, I’m investing heavily in my internal IT team and I’m getting less results’”.

Every entrepreneur has a vision for their company and hitting roadblocks is normal, it’s how you then assess your business and identify ways to optimise or indeed, transform, pertinent aspects that will make the difference.

Darren finishes his example: “A business might have a self-serve portal, but no one actually designed it – it takes more than a developer to build a commercial piece of software. In this day and age, you need lots of different disciplines to get the right software.”

Phil takes up the point, saying: “It’s about shifting the needle on things that really matter – identifying things that are your biggest pain points and asking if technology can help with some of those.

“You can’t expect technology to be a panacea that’s going to solve every single problem.”

For Phil, the important thing is picking your battles, investing in things like automation to parts of the business where it will have a tangible impact.

“If you’ve got a complex process, and you’re drowning in the amount of time it takes to work through these issues, what we would do is pick apart that process and automate a portion of it,” he says.

“If you try and boil the ocean, you’re not going to deliver anything, you need to give some value that you can then iteratively build on”.

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A Digital Transformation Success Story

One of the issues in discussing positive digital transformation strategy is the inherent nature of the topic can make even good advice somewhat nebulous.

As such, familiarising yourself with a real-life example can illuminate ways in which, with good direction, you can take your business forward with digital transformation.

Thankfully, Phil and Darren are more than happy to accommodate this.

“One of the strongest examples of digital transformation in ClearSky Logic’s recent history has been around what we’ve done with Fresh Car Valeting,” says Darren.

He goes on: “The situation when we met that client was that they didn’t have a tech platform, they had a WordPress website, and they took bookings in a very manual way that held back their business.

“A consumer would leave message on their website and an employee would go through all these messages and look at lots of diaries at once to see if they could make that appointment.”

This kind of issue is incredibly prevalent in so many businesses and this kind of arrangement at scale will simply put the brakes on, especially with enterprises that run on fine profit margins.

With this kind of model, taking more bookings simply means taking on more admin staff meaning they essentially cancel each other out.

Darren, on how they addressed this issue: “We got involved and pondered what was really holding this business back – it wasn’t a flashy website. The real problem was the overhead in managing bookings.”

Once the problem had been identified, it gave ClearSky the impetus to move on to delivering.

“At first, we started by building a journey where consumers could book in for an appointment – it was still an enquiry but at least you could get the key details from the consumer to cut down on the time it takes to manage that,” says Darren.

“It’s always stepping stones for any kind of digital transformation and we were able to deliver that in six weeks and in this case, it cut down the admin time from 100% to 80%.

“The next step on that journey was regarding appointments – where those were landing was a system that wasn’t bespoke. So, we built them a custom CRM to fast-track the way they were handling appointments, so it was now five clicks as opposed to 20.”

Now, Fresh Car Valeting has gone from 12 valets to 38 all over the UK.

There’s plenty here that’s extrapolatable businesses operating in a litany of sectors, a thought reflected by Darren.

He says: “These are the kinds of problems that are holding back multiple industries – full-services, sales – maybe there’s a technical solution that these businesses can’t find on their own.”

The ClearSky Logic Approach

With years working together at Spark Energy, Phil and Darren have plenty experience in delivering projects and starting ClearSky Logic was an intuitive move, on this, Phil says: “We love solving business problems. We don’t believe in tech for tech’s sake, which makes a big difference. Understanding tech from a business point of view is crucial to us.”

“We take a lot of care to talk to business owners about what it is they’re trying to achieve – if they could solve three problems in their business, what would they be and what the effect of that be?”

Transparency is also at the heart of ClearSky Logic’s operation. There has to be an understanding that you’re not going to solve all the problems in your business, it’s the process of identifying the tangible.

On this, Phil says: “We always try to be really clear that where a client thinks they want to get to is just that – it’s not necessarily the best or most realistic goal.

He adds: “You might get feedback that what you’ve done historically isn’t going work, moving forward. You have to embrace change and move towards a set goal incrementally, while constantly reassessing whether it’s still where you need to get to.”

If you’re ready to start your digital transformation journey, but perhaps don’t have the scope to bring in outside help, you can still take positive steps to move your business or operations forward.

If that sounds like you, then Phil has some advice for you.

He says: “Use what you can right now, you don’t have to commission an entirely new system because you think that’s what you might need.

“That’s why you should use whatever free or cheap tools you can, bearing in mind that what you build now may serve a purpose but won’t be useful down the line.”

“It’s important for startups to identify what they need next – what that is and what that’s going to get them. If you’re clear on these things and can demonstrate them with clarity, you can attract investors.”

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