Successful companies have realized that Digital Transformation isn’t just about investing in technology. Successful transformation starts as an organizational vision: It moves through the organization to realign goals, processes, and employees to leverage technology in support of that vision. Using a consumer bank as an example we’ll lay out what this can look like.

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A recent poll cited these top 5 challenges for consumer banking in 2020:

1. Growing Deposits
2. Keeping up with technology needs
3. Increasing Loans
4. Increasing Earnings
5. Attracting and retaining qualified staff

Aligning project initiatives to these goals and laying out objectives and key results at the correct organizational level is the key to quickly realizing results. The organization chart below shows the top level of leadership in a regional bank. While each executive fundamentally understands these goals connecting them to a measurable result is often neglected or lagging to such a level that attribution can become subjective.

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Retail Banking Organizational Chart

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Let’s look at that first objective “Growing Deposits”: Many banks look at net deposits to gauge the success of a particular initiative or campaign. However, drilling down to our first level of management and aligning objectives there we can start to target more specific outcomes to produce a larger result.

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Retail Banking Organizational Chart

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SVP Human Resources: Banking is a relationship business setting objectives that grow deposits may look like the following:

1. In order to build stronger relationships with our customers we will reduce customer facing role attrition to 5%.
2. In order to keep employee moral high we will execute 2 events celebrating our employees and their accomplishments each quarter.
3. In order to expand our services with our customers we will invest in 20 hours of training on our products and services for our employees per quarter.

SVP Retail Banking: Customers are seeking higher returns for their deposits and trustworthy banking professionals to help advise them on financial offerings.

1. In order to attract new customers the bank will offer 3% interest rates on new deposits up to 20% growth.
2. In order to maintain our existing deposits we will focus on increasing our interactions to 10 per quarter (web, email, call, walk-in).
3. In order to provide better service to our customers and increase our customer understanding we will expand our service offerings to include credit monitoring on all accounts by the end of Q2.

So what about the digital side of transformation. While there are many components one of the first should be a focus on bringing reliable reporting to your leaders. Aligning the SLT to a common group of OKRs and building trust and competency in the tools that track against them will keep you aligned to your goals.

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Retail Banking Organizational Chart

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The dashboard above highlights our key objectives from earlier. First in yellow we highlight our trending headcount and attrition. This brings immediate situational awareness to our progress over time and any deviations that have occurred. Below in red we highlight our leading indicators: PTO usage, and employees under review. At the top right in orange trending training hours again validates compliance with the goal and allows for trend spotting with recent interventions. Finally in the bottom right we zoom out to look at our core organizational goal of deposit growth to gauge top level progress.

Generally a handful of dashboards such as the one above will be built for each member of the SLT. Transparency should be encouraged where prudent throughout the organization to further increase a shared sense of purpose and execution.

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Many companies find themselves off track on their digital journey due to overly complex implementations or perceived dependencies. Focusing on outcomes and putting in place the necessary people and process to execute them is more critical than the technology itself. Transformation happens when organizations use technology to augment and automate a strong foundation to accelerate efficiency and scale.