More information on Digital Transformation here: https://www.castsoftware.com/use-cases/accelerate-it-modernization The digital transformation wave is hitting its peak. An IDC study found that global enterprise spending related to digital experiences is set to reach $1.7 trillion in 2019. The problem is that companies are spending heavily on digital transformation, but not getting results: Approximately 59 percent of those polled in the IDC study identified as companies at a digital impasse—stuck in an early stage of maturation and struggling to move forward. Digital transformation frameworks—formalized strategies that define priorities and create clear technology roadmaps —are essential to becoming a digitally mature organization. The 20x20n approach gives organizations an iterative, cohesive base to build their efforts around. It isn’t just a high-level philosophy, it’s a pragmatic, analytics-driven framework. More information on Digital Transformation here: https://www.castsoftware.com/use-cases/accelerate-it-modernization

1. TO ACCELERATING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Taking the
20x 20n
approach
eBOOK

2. Contents
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
S ECTION ONE
Digital Transformation and the Role of Frameworks
Introduction
20x20n
: An overview
S ECTION TW O
Assessment and planning
Understanding business drivers
Assessing the tech stack
Identifying roadblocks to digital transformation
S ECTION TH R EE
Initial Waves: Putting plans into action
Getting new capabilities in place
Setting a base for sustainable innovation
S ECTION FOUR
Subsequent waves: Accelerating delivery and
improving the digital landscape
Moving into advanced capabilities
Establishing a transformed application landscape
Driving digital transformation with the 20x20n model

3. Saad Ayub
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Saad Ayub is the former Chief Information Officer for Scholastic
Incorporated where he was responsible for providing IT vision
for Scholastic, partnering with business leaders to deliver
business enabling capabilities, and enhancing his organizational
effectiveness. Prior to Scholastic, Saad worked at The Hartford and
Aetna where he led various IT organizations. Key technical areas
that he was responsible for included: Call center automation,
internet technologies, content management, data warehouse, and
customer service systems (web, IVR, and call center).
Saad joined Aetna from McKinsey and Company, where he
worked with various financial and insurance companies
on numerous projects including business and IT strategy,
application portfolios, infrastructure management, and project
implementations. Before McKinsey, Saad was with GTE Labs
in Waltham, MA, where he was involved in the development of
business support systems, refinement of business processes, and
various application development efforts.
He holds a BS degree in Computer Engineering from Middle East
Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. He also earned an MS
degree in Computer Science, an MBA and a Ph.D. in Computer
Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
Saad Ayub
CEO, Managing Director
Ruminado Group

4. DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
AND THE ROLE OF
FRAMEWORKS
Section One

5. Introduction
The digital transformation wave is hitting its peak. An IDC
study found that global enterprise spending related to digital
experiences is set to reach $1.7 trillion in 2019.
The problem is that companies are spending heavily on
digital transformation, but not getting results: Approximately
59 percent of those polled in the IDC study identified as
companies at a digital impasse—stuck in an early stage of
maturation and struggling to move forward.
Digital transformation frameworks—formalized strategies that
define priorities and create clear technology roadmaps —are
essential in becoming a digitally mature organization. The
20x20n approach gives organizations an iterative, cohesive
base to build their efforts around. It isn’t just a high-level
philosophy, it’s a pragmatic, analytics-driven framework.
Global enterprise spending related
to digital experiences is set to reach
$1.7 trillion in 2019.
01
SECTION ONE
$1.7
TRILLION

6. 02
20x20n
: An overview
The 20x20n framework was developed in response to two
key trends:
Business units that are driving digital transformation in
isolation from CIOs and other tech leaders.
Organizations hiring CIOs specifically to drive digitalization
to support corporate goals.
In both of these scenarios, CIOs have to accelerate the
delivery of capabilities that are required for the digital
transformation. In the 20x20n
approach to acceleration,
SECTION ONE
analysis, product development and process improvements
come together to fuel IT-business alignment. The key, in
all of this, is identifying the drivers behind transformation
and accelerating the process through a fact-based
understanding of constraints, technology capabilities and
organizational issues.
To achieve this end, the framework advocates a 20-week
assessment process that is followed by 20 weeks focused on
delivering on what was learned during analysis. The n in the
20x20 represents the way this process takes place cyclically,
in multiple waves.
Caret-Right
Caret-Right
Caret-Right Build capabilities:
Technology
Organizational
Caret-Right Develop building blocks
Caret-Right Continuous assessment
Caret-Right Focused Improvement
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
IS A JOURNEYASSESSMENT AND PLANNING
Caret-Right Review the entire application portfolio
Caret-Right Assess element of the technology landscape
through application portfolio lens
Caret-Right Identify road blocks and accelerators
Caret-Right Build score card based on application
portfolio lens
20x20n
WAVE
WAVE

7. ASSESSMENT AND PLANNING
Section Two

8. 03
Understanding
business drivers
Value creation is instrumental to ongoing digital progress,
and every initiative should begin with clear analysis of the
business drivers behind the change. Leaders must ensure
business drivers, not a specific technology, are anchoring
digital transformation efforts.
Major drivers behind digitalization include:
• The need for seamless interactions across customer
experiences to drive repeat and new business.
• The growing demand for personalized custom
experiences and interactions, a shift that requires
changes from marketing out to customer services and
engagement.
• The rise of new digital products that create value
opportunities.
• The heightened speed and precision needed in internal
processes in response to digital customer experiences.
• Optimizing the technology landscape based on
business mode, external services and the cyclical
nature of business.
SECTION TWO
All of these drivers come together to create a
central theme that is behind every component
of digital transformation: Business models
and technology capabilities must be
redefined or radically changed to create
cohesive, intelligent experiences for
customers and employees alike.

9. 04
Assessing the tech stack
Because digitalization involves dramatic changes to the business,
you can’t get by without similarly altering the IT configuration. The
IT leaders have to take a radically different approach in order to be
an equal partner in transformation.
The 20x20n approach includes a few key points of analysis here,
including:
• Mapping applications portfolio to each business driver.
• Performing a deep analysis of applications, their capabilities
and the upkeep required to ensure they’re running.
• Analyzing how the infrastructure available within the
configuration is supporting your current app climate and how
it will work moving forward in light of the business drivers you
are prioritizing.
• Evaluating the skills and resources available within your IT
staff and considering how shared services are supplementing
internal tech capabilities.
With this assessment completed,
organizations should create a
scorecard that establishes goals for the
transformation process and tracks their
ability to deliver on business efforts.
SECTION TWO

10. 05
Identifying
roadblocks to digital
transformation
At this point, you have a fairly clear idea of what you
have in mind both in terms of the business issues behind
transformation and the tech capabilities on hand. With
this basis in place, it’s time to get proactive in identifying
problems that may arise as you try to achieve your goals.
For example, analyzing applications based on business
initiatives can help you pin down when existing app
capabilities won’t align with what your employees need to do
to get the job done.
One of the eventual goals of this digital transformation
framework is to establish a pattern of continuous delivery
at speed. You have to get proactive to achieve such an
ambitious end.
SECTION TWO

11. INITIAL WAVES:
PUTTING PLANS TO ACTION
Section Three

12. 06
Getting new
capabilities in place
The 20x20n framework incorporates clear phases into
multiple waves. Each wave has to ensure it is making
progress around four key elements. They are:
• Putting new business capabilities into place.
• Rolling out foundational services.
• Performing another round of assessments.
• Solidifying the overarching improvements to
technology landscape and organizational delivery
capabilities that come from these efforts.
SECTION THREE
During the initial waves of your 20x20n
transformation, new capability rollouts
will incorporate:
• Deploying applications.
• Establishing new organizational capabilities.
• Enhancing existing apps.
• Taking advantage of third-party products.
• Developing a clear system of core and value-add
capabilities in your systems.
• Tweaking architectural functionality to reflect digital goals.
The new capabilities process involves making
relatively small changes that deliver on key
functionality the business needs.

13. 07
Setting a base for
sustainable innovation
With new capabilities in place, it’s important to make sure those
improvements aren’t made in isolation. Instead, the framework
builds on added functionality by encouraging larger changes
that allow for sustained momentum. During the initial waves,
these include:
Foundational services: Transforming APIs, creating
reusable business operations, building microservices, dealing
with legacy systems and developing data-focused services.
Assessment: Analysis needs to be a habit to sustain
innovation. Otherwise, your plans may fall apart once
circumstances shift.
SECTION THREE
Improvements: Build on all the work in earlier
phases to drive both cultural and big-picture operational
improvements. Specific tactics include:
• Protecting and controlling the app portfolio.
• Improving app agility for the most impacted
digital ecosystems.
• Adjusting infrastructure in light of change.
• Ramping up risk management.

14. SUBSEQUENT WAVES:
ACCELERATING DELIVERY AND
IMPROVING THE DIGITAL LANDSCAPE
Section Four

15. 08
Moving into advanced
capabilities
When you’ve made some of those initial app deployments
and business changes that come with digital transformation,
you’ve reached the point of maturation where many
companies get stuck.
Putting an emphasis on consistent re-assessment and
fact-based improvement is key in avoiding transformation
roadblocks. Our later waves of innovation can take you from
there. In these more advanced parts of digital transformation,
you should be establishing more sophisticated capabilities in
executing your digital goals, including:
• Move to outcome-based development.
• Increased cloud migration.
• Digitally-enabled APIs.
• Microservices sitting on top of legacy systems
• Fully-modernized architectures.
• Technical debt reduction.
• Improving landscape resiliency, efficiency and
security of applications.
SECTION FOUR
These types of capabilities help organizations
go beyond a pattern of rolling out digital
technologies and enable them to establish a
digitally transformed landscape in which their
underlying IT capabilities can keep up with
business drivers on a consistent basis.

16. 09
Establishing a
transformed
application landscape
Many of the benefits that come in this ongoing cycle of launching
capabilities, delivering foundational services, performing
assessments and solidifying improvements take place in the
applications stack.
Apps are becoming the central currency of digital transformation.
Users need apps that help them get data in line with business
processes, and therefore serve as key enablers for both cultural
and operational change.
Improving your API architectures, taking on continuous integration
efforts, enacting agile development and otherwise modernizing
your app capabilities is essential to achieving digital maturity.
From there, it is essential that you monitor progress around code
improvement and adherence to digital architecture.
These issues don’t just extend to your internal operations either,
as you must also have transparency into third-party app services
and manage them efficiently.
SECTION FOUR

17. Driving digital
transformation with
the 20 x 20n
model
This framework begins with a core of 20 weeks of
assessment and 20 weeks of deliver. But the ideology
comes together with the n.
Your budget, your current tech capabilities and your
business goals will all influence just how big your digital
transformation efforts will become. The n represents
the need for consistent, ongoing progress. You don’t just
complete a wave and move on. Instead, consider the
waves as cyclical moves that repeat to drive your business
forward.
Successful transformation will empower organizations
to reach a place where they can quickly access their
application portfolio and will have the capabilities needed
to continuously monitor the state of the application
landscape as one goes through multiple iterations of
delivering capabilities.
10
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Sources:
https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS43188017
Client materials
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-1Wqc8omrgpyjq6IrM4fg1Hi_oi-OjrEHOADJHxFMl0/edit?usp=sharing
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