“Continuous Transformation” is one of those expressions that might sound a bit redundant to some, like “black darkness” or “burning fire”, and almost oxymoronic as “pretty ugly”, “crash landing” to others.
Transformation suggests to people that once the transformation is complete, you are done, so “continuous transformation” hits just as odd as “change management” once was, so allow me to expand on this term.
Continuous Transformation is all about responding quickly to the ways that technology can change how business is conducted. For example: Reorganizing your business around customer experience and expectations. How an organization can transform around customer journey. Whether it is banking, manufacturing, or retail. Typically, a business has different depts, and different brick and mortar stores, and they have e-commerce, and customer service, phone support, post-sales support, and warranty organization, and returns, etc. From a customer perspective, they might be in a store one day talking to a sales associate, another day they might be calling for support, different person different concerns, if they have to return something, again it is a different thing altogether. So, when an organization re-architects how they do business and re-architects how they meet customer needs, they are thinking about customer journey as a single thing, and not as an amalgamation of different dept concerns;… (The goal is) A continuous set of transformation processes that involves the initial customer touch points, or the advertisement/marketing to bring the customer into the store, whether they shop online, in-store, over the phone, those are separate marketing channels but they are all part of that single customer experience, part of a single “omnichannel” customer journey. But it doesn’t stop when the sale is made (that’s one of the common mistakes, especially in retail), it continues after that with post-sale support, up-sale and cross sale marketing opportunities, warranty service. The full lifecycle of the customer.
So, how do you come up with that whole customer journey if you haven’t already gone down that route? it involves A) rethinking how human processes work: how the individual depts work, whether it is merchandising in the store, the e-commerce, the warranty return service. B) rethinking how they can work together using information that they know about the customer, and C) rethinking these processes and how this transformation process will affect the way the company does business. That is business transformation event called “Digital Transformation”.
Enterprise Architecture (EA) takes a wholistic view of the enterprise(*) by looking at all the different architecture domains: people, business processes, applications, information, technical infrastructure, physical space, your motivations, constrains, what your current existing capabilities are and which ones need development to achieve your business goals. EA helps connects these complex business contexts, the objectives that drives the internal teams, the technology that supports them, the siloes and gaps that divides them, and the desirable business outcomes. That is the value of EA, realized in a transformative event.
These transformative events come in different shapes: whether it is Cloud-migration, microservice-based architectures, a new ERP system, rationalize CRM, merges and acquisitions, or simply transitioning to Remote Work. Having an “agile architecture” is a move enables continuous business transformation – where the organization is as agile as it wants to be, and is able to deal with change as a routine part of how it does business. It really speaks to the challenge: Prototype for 1x, Build for 10x, Engineer for 100x. Dream in years, measure monthly, evaluate weekly, ship daily.
Emerging technologies are going to accelerate the rate at which companies will be required to transform themselves. Furthermore, the transformations will become more frequent and the cycles between transformations will become shorter. In short, organizations will need to embrace the “continuous transformation” mantra to reap the benefits of current and future technologies.
Alberto D. Mendoza 
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