No-Man’s Land. It’s a term I remember fondly from tennis.
Describing that moment when you start to aggressively approach the net, but think twice about it, and get caught flat-footed in the middle of the court — too far from your opponent to cut off a volley to either side, yet too close to run back and field an overhead lob…
For every successful digital transformation initiative we encounter, we come across three or more losing plays, where companies get stuck in this interminable limbo of no-man’s land, and are failing to reach their aspired digital transformation goals.
Why does this happen so frequently?
The unhappy middle ground of limbo
You could chalk up many foundering initiatives to indecision or risk aversion on the part of leadership. Indeed, a lack of executive initiative may be the best place to start, if you are seeking to lay blame for why efforts once identified as mission-critical seem to be going nowhere fast.
But blaming leadership isn’t worth much, when trying to pivot against endemic, organization-wide problems.
Since we’re talking about digital transformation, which encompasses much more than a single project or business division here, it’s best to recognize what getting stuck in the middle looks like when mapped to strategic initiatives.
| Initiative | Status Quo | Limbo | Ideal State |
| Legacy modernization | Siloed systems Rigid, inflexible processes |
Ad-hoc integrations Adapted semi-automated processes |
Ingest legacy apps and data silos into new agile process architecture |
| Cloud migration | Conventional or managed datacenters only, high reserve cost, scaling issues | Unpredictable cloud capacity and costs, duplicate systems, rogue IT buying | Governed elastic scaling and expected cost benefits of cloud |
| DevOps | Waterfall dev & delivery process, 2 releases/year, Ops ‘keeping lights on’ | ‘Agilefall’ software delivery approval gates, issue backlog never shrinks, firefights and rollbacks common | Collaborative 10-100x rate of delivery, high automation and observability |
| Security | Perimeter-oriented network security, tight SecOps change controls, unexpected vulnerabilities, lack employee awareness | Proliferation of different security tools/training for each layer, exhaustive SoC reviews for change/risk assessment, SecOps response team | Policy-based security management, observability and automation across hybrid IT, proactive threat hunting |
As much as software and infrastructure vendors would like to describe themselves as a silver bullet solving the above challenges for their defined problem spaces, taking on new tooling can only solve one part of any such problem.
Services companies and consultants can also bring their own ‘Pros from Dover’ with process change frameworks to bear, and proof points of successful past implementations, but such methodologies may not be welcomed by the internal antibodies of a truly change-resistant organization.
Saves vs. unforced errors: the real racket
All of this leads us back to blaming leadership. Clearly, many of the most dangerous cases of no-man’s-land happen when top executives are indecisive, or too risk-averse to pick a winning strategy and truly commit to it, until it’s too late.
Good leadership goes far beyond that though. Much of the enterprise’s ability to adapt to change is trained and cultivated over time, as an organization-wide level of responsiveness.
Leaders that are able to coach and harness the perception, expertise and diversity of thought of their entire workforce are the standout performers here.
Empowered employees operate with heightened perception, and take responsibility for the success of the transformation effort. They don’t allow critical projects to get assigned to ‘death by committee’ or end up in the PMO budgetary ‘kill zone.’
It all starts with better defined goals — both for the bottom/top line revenue of the company and the value the transformation will deliver for customers, followed by training in better measurement methods to improve the organization’s reaction and response time, and the prioritization of new functionality and integrations to support strategic goals.
In fact a whole space known as value stream management (VSM) has arisen around solving just this broadest of technical problem spaces. I would still caveat, however, that adopting successful VSM practices has much more to do with changing behaviors.
The Intellyx Take
The silver lining of getting caught in no-man’s land? It’s certainly not permanent.
In tennis as in digital transformation, there’s always the next point to play, a potential fresh start from the last. You can continually adjust tactics to better read your opponent’s moves — and make a decisive charge on the net or conservatively hang back on the baseline for a better chance at winning.
In business IT, where as many as two-thirds of projects still overrun cost and timeline estimates, the commonplace nature of such errors can also mean the willing change agents may still get a few more cuts at recovery and course correction.
Have any good examples of your own company’s initiatives that got caught in no man’s land, or strategies that shook your teams out of this zone? I’m curious to hear them — let me know more at pr@intellyx.com and we’ll revisit this story.
Until then, here’s to the next rally.
© 2021, Intellyx, LLC. Intellyx retains editorial control over the content of this article. Image source: Tim Vrtiska, Tennis Court, flickr cc2.0 license.
