Virtualizing Business Transformation

What if you could simulate business change in a virtual twin of your own business?

In a number of industries the concept of virtualizing products and materials is already applied. For example, the development of aerospace engines and wind turbines, it is more common to create a digital twin of the actual product to perform simulations.

In these scenarios changes to the product or the applied circumstances can be simulated before the actual change is being applied to the real product.

In this article Product Digital Twins sourced from McKinsey, there is an explanation about Digital twins, but also how much a digital twin concept can improve ‘faster time to market and improved quality of a product’, as well as revenue uplift.

“ What if you can simulate business change through a virtual copy of your organisation, and deliver faster, improve quality and increase workforce and resource performance “

Managing change remotely or on site

In my experience a key realization of managing change is the fact that the reality is different to the ‘paper version'. As part of the change teams we frequently travelled for change programs. Before covid it was very normal to have boots on the ground in the place where change was going to happen.

Being on site, meant we were able to see how the intended changes impacted the people and their day to day activities. And often there were some situations where the real world conditions were different to the assumptions we made in the design.

Covid changed that approach significantly, and made me realize how much it helps to understand the real world layout and having boots on the ground. Therefore I started to include components such as floorplans and pictures of the environment in my due diligence for change programs. With understanding the layout of a building, shop floor or office, it made it significantly easier to understand the people, their activities and their associated behavior to those activities.

There was another major benefit resulting the the quality of conversation and trust between the teams. When the change team is prepared and understands where people work, how they act within their environment, it creates a level of trust and comfort to engage. this

Theory to real world

Consider in most digital change programs there is a transition from physical paper or a physical whiteboard to a digital paper or digital plan process. In the example a digital transition from paper to computer, things like approvals and moving work to other sites seems easy when it is being designed.

But in reality if physical paper is received and needs to be included in the approval, there will be extra effort to scan documents and make sure the right scan is attached to the right approval record.

This sounds easy, but for an environment who has been working with paper folders and physical approvals with signatures and stamps, this is a major transition.

A digital twin as part of change management

The digital twin concept has evolved very rapidly within the last years. But there is still quite some work needed to make it easier to apply a digital twin in simple concepts. Also stating that a digital twin requires a number of attributes which have been labour/cost intensive to create.

But we’re not far off.

Assume that each building/office space/shop floor/etc. which is build in the recent years has a 3 dimensional drawing of the environment (a CAD drawing in most circumstances).

This is often needed to draw out the different elements, such as the general structure, electricity, plumbing, air vents, etc.

The Digital Twin Elements

This 3 dimensional drawing is one of the main components, the other component is the data. The data regarding change management is usually different to regular business performance data. Nut when considering what is needed, there is a lot of this information available in presentation decks, change & strategy proposals, project plan documentation and task management documentation.

If there would be a way to digitize that information, this information can be applied within the digital twin. We’ll circle back to the data later.

The 3rd element is the digital experience. An immersive digital experience started with virtual reality devices and gaming platforms. But the development of immersive experiences has evolved rapidly. Where today immersive experiences in games can be rendered on mobile devices, e.g. the ROBLOX platform, and more recently metaverse style experiences are embedded into business apps. An example is Microsoft Mesh:

Introducing Microsoft Mesh | Connect like never before

Mesh is an immersive experience within teams, which is intended to improve collaboration and a more natural interaction compared a face on screen.

But in similar context, if the environment in mesh could represent your office or your work environment, you can actually review impact of a change in a virtual simulated approach.

The Data

As mentioned before, we would circle back to business change and transformation data.

A lot of this information is in a static document or repository. Within Organisation Insights, we have developed a methodology and application to manage change information. This data can easily be exposed into a data stream to represent into a digital twin. We capture

• basic information on the physical location, a site.

• positions working at a site

• applications and integrations used at a site,

• business processes performed at a site.

• change programs active at a site

And we record the relationship in between of these elements. So when considering an office environment, we can represent the business processes performed, we can represent the technology used (which apps and integrations), we can represent volume of change, the employment structure. And if needed show this in combined layers, to show people, their responsibility of processes and the tech used.

Virtual Business Transformation

What if you want to replace a resource or you want to move processes to a different workstation, or if you want to replace a piece of technology?

What if you could simulate these hypothetical considerations, and see in your virtual environment how much impact your intended changes will have.

The information is not any different to writing a traditional report, and being able to read the impact. But with a digital twin, the change management, the collaboration and impact assessment could be much closer to reality.

Circling back to trust and preparation, what if you could simulate a change together with the people impacted, and show how their future looks. It will be much easier to build trust and understanding of the impact, when you have common understanding of the conditions and environment.

Is it worth the investment

A digital twin is expensive to create, and potentially for just managing change it might not be worth investing into this concept. However if you can incorporate your business performance metrics into the same virtualization process, you can use the review process for day to day performance reviews as well as change impact.

For example, if you apply this into a remote factory which is making your products, you can see their production process and performance, identify equipment activity, througput of orders and products, storage volumes, etc. There is probably already a reporting mechanism that shows this information, but very likely this is represented in a traditional flat report or dashboard.

Again, is it worth it… you can get the same info in a different less complicated and less expensive way. But the added benefits of a digital representation of your organisation helps with creating trust and common understanding, specifically within a change process. And that benefit is difficult to identify in cost savings or revenue.