A few colleagues and I have some long running jokes, thanks in large part to Dilbert and The Office, where we slip borderline meaningless business phrases into our stand-ups and backlog grooming sessions. Shout out to the agile teams out there! We slyly talk “synergies” (with hands clasped together for full effect of course). A deft reference to a “holistic solution”, or a winked question asking “yes, but can we operationalize it?” will score some extra humor points. There is one though, that we don’t quite know what to do with yet, because while the meaningfulness of the others came and went, we are still living and defining perhaps the most pervasive business term right now. In the enterprise software space, there are few more loaded and nebulous terms than “digital transformation”. General consensus tells us that it is the use of new technologies, software and cloud services to solve ages old business problems… Which… Is a rather wide berth for applying any meaning to the term. What we do know, and observe day in and day out, is that marketplaces, businesses and even entire economies can change overnight. And moving forward, our success is completely tied to ability to adapt to these changes. No small task for unwieldy and often slow-moving enterprises.

Which means as a leader of a software team with a value prop tied to this business wave, I needed to do some introspection with the team to see how we fit into this revolution, and in the end, how are we helping individuals and businesses adapt to the onslaught of changes they are facing in today’s volatile markets. Giving more importance to this is that our promise here at Kollective is to help the enterprise power those transformations by giving them more bandwidth, by powering meeting software to connect coworkers across the globe, allowing IT groups to push software and security patches out to the edge of their networks with the push of a button, all while delivering deep intelligence back that inform and let decision makers know what really matters at the end of the day… “how are we doing?”.

This introspection is helpful, and even critical, to understanding how we can build software that moves the needle, instills confidence, and pushes teams to digitally transform in a way that is empowering. And since we build software that powers this, to get to these answers we began looking at the data that we produce to find the leading indicators of enterprises that are successfully transforming. Over the next two articles, we will explore the data on the bleeding edge, and how that data can inform us about the pathways to successfully achieving this, and it’s impact on how companies can fuel their change.