Series 2 Episode 01: Louise O’Conor
On the 1st episode of season 2 I’m joined by Louise O’Conor.
Louise is a strategic and innovative leader with 20 years experience digitally transforming and scaling businesses and teams across global markets and multiple industries. Louise sits on the board of the Irish International Business Network (IIBN), is a co-founder of the non-profit IrelandTogether and a Partner in Digital Transformation consultancy Beta Digital. She also speaks 6 languages!
We chat about:
Louise’s experience in digital transformation, before it even had a name!
Digital Transformation misconceptions
Enabling change
Measuring Digital Transformation
Advice for women hoping to start their own consultancy
Check out below some of my favourite quotes from our discussion and listen to the full conversation on itunes or spotify.
How Louise defines Digital Transformation
The way I look at digital transformation is that it's a strategy to adapt an existing business to changing market and customer demands, and it's all about the customer.
Digital transformation is simply a business strategy to adapt a company from where it is now to where it wants to be.
On the importance of purpose to drive business decisions
I always start out with purpose and I know from a marketing perspective that sounds a bit fluffy and companies especially at C-Suite level say we already know what we want to do but they often don’t. If you want a website you don’t suddenly just want to be online - is it a site for brochureware, is it e-commerce or is it a community - what is the website for? It’s about asking a lot of whys and why now?
If you don’t start with purpose you don’t know where you’re going. We’re at a time where there’s so much technology but customer demands are changing. If I can’t buy what I want instantly you’ll go elsewhere. The purpose of companies has been changing based on customer demand. You’re not just changing technology you’re changing process, and people - do they have the skills? Technology is only the enabler. You can talk about the latest AI or blockchain but if you don’t know why you’re using it you’re going to spend a fortune.
How businesses can respond in the wake of COVID-19
COVID showed businesses initially coming to a standstill and then fire fighting when they realised it was going to be longer term; so companies added a lot of different technologies in order to help distributed teams and facilitate communication.
Every single business should now be looking at what they have added technology wise, what have they added in terms of their communications strategy, where are they…and what does the next 12 months look like? And strategy is that, it’s looking at your business from an outside perspective because sometimes when you’re in it you’re too close. So you’re looking at your business, where do you want to be, how can you get there through the changes that are happening and building out that plan together.
Successfully enabling business change
There’s so many companies I go into where the front-end team doesn’t talk to the back-end team. There’s no IT representation on the board so they’re building out a strategy but the people who are actually implementing it aren’t included in the conversation.
The most difficult part is bringing people along on the journey. Change requires trust and good communication internally and externally. You can’t suddenly say in a board meeting you’re becoming a different type of company as it impacts every team. It’s about the process, people and the technology. It starts always with people. There’s a fear going back to the industrial revolution on technology replacing people but people still need to run and feed machines. It takes strong leadership.
Normally I work with getting different champions within each department, if you can find one person who believes, it can make such a difference. You have to make sure everyone is included, has an opportunity to ask questions and feels part of it. It has to be believed at the top, that this is truly where they want to go, otherwise they’ll always revert back to what they’ve previously known. It’s top level buy-in but bringing people along in the change.
Measuring Digital Transformation
When you’re looking at any change it takes time to see the difference. I think one of the most important things is what are you currently spending on technology and fixing problems that result from this.
What are you currently spending at the point before you start the project, and then what are you going to save from the amount of time saved and the technology not being broken. So time is really important.
It also reduces costs and I don’t mean overheads. One company I worked with was moving from product to SaaS software. They couldn’t understand why customers wouldn’t buy multi year licenses. We found that to customers and internally by teams, it was still being sold as product not SaaS and that we’re now a SaaS company was the only message being repeated.
Communication and training across the different teams is needed. Within 6 months of doing a complete transformation and over communicating internally and externally and bringing everyone on that journey the average lead value moved from £1,500 to £15,000 in 6 months. In another project with a bigger company of over 1000 employees, it took 2.5 years with 3 different markets and 5 different departments and building out these teams, but we showed the increase in revenue by 9600% in digital but overall revenue saw a 280% increase. 280% of the company was now digitally enabled, and able to reach customers globally which previously would have had to been done in person.
What advice do you have for women wanting to become a freelancer or consultant?
It's a really exciting journey but it's also tough. Anyone who thinks they can walk out and be a consultant is fooling themselves or are maybe a bit naive, or maybe it's just my own experience.
I had been asked to be a consultant over 10 years ago but it wasn't the right time for me. And the experience I learnt in house since then has given me the strength and knowledge and confidence to be able to do that. But it's still a journey, and being able to communicate what you do. Definitely take the plunge if you feel you're ready for it, but check in with yourself and know that you're ready, that would be the biggest recommendation I have for anyone looking to go out on their own.
Links to some of the stuff we chatted about
Beta Digital’s approach to Digital Transformation
IrelandTogether the non-profit Louise has co-founded to help businesses solve challenges brought by COVID-19
Follow Louise on Twitter @louiseoconor
