Effective Digital Transformation Depends on a Shared Language

The seeds of technical debt are sown as businesses grow, change, and innovate, naturally leading teams and departments to develop and adopt new, increasingly specialized business language to help them do their work efficiently.

This may not have presented much of an issue when the company was small — or when communication between departments was a person-to-person affair — but over time, a language barrier grew, making data sharing between departments extremely difficult.

To automate their work, departments use databases, computer systems, and applications, which employ data models and databases to capture and lock in the business language of their users.

While automation can help each department boost efficiency, it can also mean that the company winds up with multiple, disparate, department-level databases that don’t speak to each other very well.

People do a lot of work to accommodate the disparate systems: Business departments develop work-arounds and IT crafts custom interfaces to connect these systems. These measures add complexity; though without them, systems simply would not work.

The totality of this technical debt — the disparate systems, added software to accommodate them, and added work performed to work around them — will continue to grow until companies erect some guardrails to prevent the unfettered growth of disparate language.

The only proven way to fix this problem is to intervene at step one, via common language. This may seem like a daunting task — after all companies have thousands of terms in their vocabularies.

The good news is that focusing first on a small subset of terms that align with the key concepts that bind the company together makes the task manageable. Our experience shows that no more than 150 such concepts are sufficient to transform the entire company. A smaller transformation project, such as adding a customer-facing app, may require as few as half a dozen.

The secret to resolving the conflict lies in recognizing and clarifying the underlying concepts:

• First, treat “prospects,” “signers” and “responsible payers” not as tangible things, but as roles played by one or more persons or groups of persons (e.g., organizations).
• Abstract a bit further, defining a “party” as “a person or organization of interest to the enterprise.”
• Take advantage of the flexibility this permits, assigning as many roles to parties as befits the business.

Common language and data models provide an architecture that guides further technological development.

Developing these underlying concepts, gaining agreement on them, and using them going forward is hard work. It requires committed leadership and a powerful coalition of people with diverse skills. In particular, a very senior business manager — one with the authority, gravitas, and level to call out the need for common language, sell the business case, set direction, provide resources, align others and enlist them to contribute — is essential.

A senior leader must assemble and manage a diverse team to get the work done, including:

• Conceptual thinkers who can uncover the key concepts cited above.
• Skilled, business-savvy writers who can put those concepts into easily-understood, precise language.
• Negotiators who can resolve differences among various groups.
• Agents of change who convince others to adopt the common language.
• Architects and technicians who can instantiate the resulting language into systems.