Promoting the Process of Digital Transformation at the University of Memphis

This case study is drawn from experimentation over the past twelve months at the University of Memphis, a public Research II institution founded in 1912 and currently serving more than 20,000 students.

In 2018, University of Memphis CIO Robert Jackson set out to test various approaches for transforming the university's digital landscape. Although the university was eager for digital transformation, identifying the best combination of cultural and organizational principles required experimentation.

To Go Fast, Start Slow

In designing a strategy for digital transformation (Dx), CIO Robert Jackson framed the challenge as a lean startup. His goal was not primarily to complete a technological adoption but rather to experiment with ways to cultivate a creative culture. He maintained this perspective throughout the project but did so without didactically announcing his intentions.

Choosing a Minimum Viable Product

To kick-start this innovative activity, Jackson looked for an unobtrusive project that was not tied to a specific problem but that could generate new perspectives on problems and possible solutions. For this experiment, he chose the implementation of a new AI chatbot. Given the CIO's organizational goals, the chatbot is the least important element of this case—it was a project small enough to test a Dx-related tactic without triggering cultural opposition.

Building the Team

Jackson assigned leadership of the project to a member of the Web and Mobile Services staff and charged him with assembling a group of people from multiple service areas—ranging from Student Affairs to the Enrollment Services One-Stop Shop—and facilitating their experimentation with the chatbot.

The group's members were unaccustomed to working with each other on a shared support project. They had no preconceived notions about who among them might be a leader at any given point. The qualification for being involved was curiosity, and the expectation for participation was the willingness to conduct experiments with a self-service, chatbot tool.

Experimenting with the MVP

Consistent with a lean startup approach, the project began with a minimum viable product (MVP). The chatbot was limited in its interface, web location, knowledge base, and application or audience. Over the course of the year, the team explored the results of changing each of those elements, testing the effects of linking to the chatbot from various pages, adding a floating element, changing the icon, adding items to the knowledge base, and reprioritizing information domains.

Because the target population shifted constantly in its composition, profile, and interests based on the time of year, the group recognized that any commitment to assumptions about customer behavior and the user experience might be premature. During experimentation, the decision to persevere or pivot arose repeatedly, and the project resulted in a series of pivots that the vendor, the team, and the CIO would not have foreseen. Nonetheless, the lean startup Dx vision persisted, even as the direction of the project adjusted to new discoveries and surprises.

As at most institutions, the University of Memphis needed a way to break the temptation of viewing success in terms of outputs and instead understand success in terms of process. By investigating the process and improving it, the organization suspended the pursuit of short-term goals, which helped us become more adept at digital transformation. With the freedom to explore, fail early and often, and adjust, the university developed greater aptitude for digital transformation.

Lessons Learned

Over the course of this year-long experiment, our team learned various lessons.

1. A Minimum Viable Product Requires a Minimum Viable Plan

Highly structured, long-term plans can create inflexibility. According to Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses:

Unfortunately, too many startup business plans look more like they are planning to launch a rocket ship than drive a car. They prescribe the steps to take and the results to expect in excruciating detail, and as in planning to launch a rocket, they are set up in such a way that even tiny errors in assumptions can lead to catastrophic outcomes.¹

Leaving the destination open lets the team test assumptions and hypotheses and, if indicated, pivot. Remember: When adopting this approach, failure is the source of learning, not evidence of poor planning. As Ries stated, "If you cannot fail, you cannot learn."²

The initiative gave our large institution the opportunity to behave in an agile and flexible manner more akin to that of a lean startup. The project proceeded not as a linear, deductive exercise but rather as a series of conjectures, inductively transforming the culture and the organization. The project spawned creativity and openness to ideas and perspectives without reference to strategy, which would have slowed it down—and possibly elevated its development to a higher level of the organizational hierarchy.

2. To Learn Quickly, Avoid "Success Theater"

Ries not only extols the virtue of failing fast but also highlights the danger of turning everything into success as a form of theater.

When good results are not forthcoming, business leaders assume that any discrepancy between what was planned and what was built is the cause and try to specify the next iteration in greater detail. As the specifications get more detailed, the planning process slows down, batch size increases, and feedback is delayed.³

Our team was able to resist this impulse toward "success theater" because the CIO's charge did not define success in terms of vanity metrics, such as number of engagements.⁴ Also, because our commitment to the project did not entail commitment to a predetermined definition of success, the team was able to engage in the process of discovery and validated learning, which is the goal of the lean startup:

Validated learning is not after-the-fact rationalization or a good story designed to hide failure. It is a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty….⁵

It is also important to be wary of pronouncing an experiment a failure before it is complete. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter declared:

Everything looks like a failure in the middle. Everyone loves inspiring beginnings and happy endings; it is just the middles that involve hard work.⁶

Transformations inevitably involve mess, even loss, before they deliver results.

3. When Culture Is at Stake, Leadership Is Everything

In our case, the most important resource required to conduct cultural experiments was having an executive champion for the process. The CIO was the engine behind the project; he assumed the financial risks and gave us permission to fail quickly and pivot rather than persevere futilely and endlessly. As Ries noted, "Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires."⁷

A recent Harvard Business Review article characterized this approach as bringing the Silicon Valley startup mentality into the organization. In our case, the process created lean intrapreneurs who tried to make the biggest impact with the fewest actions, develop and test hypotheses, and fail as quickly as possible to learn as rapidly as possible.

4. Use Lean Startup Principles as a Guide

To accelerate culture change, we found it helpful to behave like an entrepreneur, begin with the customer, and keep in mind the following principles:

• Solid value and growth hypotheses. Ries defines the value hypothesis as testing "whether a product or service really delivers value to customers once they are using it," and the growth hypothesis as testing "how new customers will discover a product or service."⁸ That is, value is determined by the person or interests served. Customers are unlikely to change their behavior if they perceive no value in doing so.
• Small batches. Find quick wins or quick failures; the point is to do it quickly. As OODA Loop creator John Boyd noted, the key to victory is to make appropriate decisions faster than the opponent.
• Minimum viable product. Ries notes that the MVP helps entrepreneurs start the process of learning as quickly as possible: "It is simply the fastest way to get through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop with the minimum amount of effort."⁹ He says the goal of the MVP is "to begin the process of learning, not end it" and to test fundamental business hypotheses.
• Pivots. "A pivot is not just an exhortation to change. Remember, it is a special kind of structured change designed to test a new hypothesis about the product, business model, and engine of growth. It is the heart of the Lean Startup method."¹⁰ Avoid the traps of the sunk-cost fallacy, endowment bias, and confirmation bias. Persevering too long is costly.

The lean approach can be applied to the user experience (UX). As figure 1 shows, Jeff Gothelf's Lean UX Canvas ties the lean startup principles together in a coherent template.

Following the order of Gothelf's template illustrates a key point: Dx does not drive UX; Dx follows UX and responds to it. If you think you know your customer, design a hypothesis to test your assumptions. If you are right, move on to the next hypothesis. If you are wrong, pivot. This is the heart of the lean startup, and it is the key to digital transformation.

Where to Learn More

In addition to his blog for entrepreneurs, Steve Blank has published several key articles on lean startups, including: "Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything," and (with Bob Dorf) "The Customer Development Manifesto." Blank has also published two books:

• Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win (Palo Alto: K&S Ranch, 2013)
• The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step by Step Guide for Building a Great Company (Palo Alto: K&S Ranch, 2012)

Other excellent resources on this topic include

• Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries (Hoboken: Wiley, 2010)
• Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (Hoboken: Wiley, 2014)
• Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business, (Bloomington: Xlibris, 2004)
• Behnam Tabrizi, Ed Lam, Kirk Gerard, and Vernon Irvin, "Digital Transformation Is Not about Technology," Harvard Business Review (March 13, 2019)

Notes

1. Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (New York: Random House, 2011), 21. ↩
2. Ibid., 56. ↩
3. Ibid., 126. ↩
4. Ibid., 53. ↩
5. Ibid., 38. ↩
6. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, "Change Is Hardest in the Middle," Harvard Business Review, (August 12, 2009). ↩
7. Ries, The Lean Startup, 34. ↩
8. Ibid., 60. ↩
9. Ibid., 93. ↩
10. Ibid., 177. ↩

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Robert M. Johnson, Jr., is Associate CIO at the University of Memphis.