In our previous article, we explained how industrialization represents a performance lever for companies. Its various facets—standardization, automation, sharing of resources—are real accelerators of operational efficiency, cost optimization, and time to market. Industrialization can thus become a catalyst for sustainable transformation, allowing a company to gain efficiency, agility, and competitiveness while ensuring the security and resilience of its systems.
Beyond the promise, how do you implement it successfully?
At Talisker, we believe that industrialization must be addressed at the company level—not just within the IT department—to deliver value across the organization, from internal teams to end customers. Implementing industrialization is a cross-functional project that often requires collaboration between IT and Operations: it is a true enterprise-wide initiative.
Three main challenges in implementing industrialization
-
Organizational challenges:
Too often seen as a technical initiative with limited connection to business teams or end users, industrialization remains an IT-focused topic. Organizational structures and sometimes difficult collaboration between business and IT are common challenges for our clients. Demonstrating ROI on costly projects is another hurdle, limiting stakeholder engagement—including business teams, employees, and executive management. -
Cultural challenges:
Adopting an automation culture goes beyond implementing new technologies. It requires changing mindsets and work habits across the workforce. Companies often face resistance from employees who fear loss of tasks or control. Standardizing processes may also require abandoning historical practices, which can be destabilizing. -
Technological challenges:
Implementing industrialization must also contend with legacy systems, inherited processes, and limited skills.
How to overcome these challenges
-
Engage business teams and establish shared governance:
Creating a cross-functional industrialization community can break down silos and foster collaboration around a common, strategic topic. Defining dedicated roles such as Industrialization Product Owner or Champions helps structure and coordinate initiatives, while spreading best practices across business, technical, and operational teams. This governance ensures proximity to operational teams and alignment with business needs, avoiding rigid or disconnected initiatives. -
Drive change and communicate effectively:
Broad engagement and strong collaboration are essential in a change management strategy tied to industrialization. Clear communication of automation benefits, involving employees in the transformation process, clarifying new objectives and higher-value activities, and showcasing successful use cases are critical to convincing skeptics. -
Concrete actions to evolve the organization:
To implement industrialization effectively, companies must take tangible steps. Employee skills need to evolve alongside new technologies. Continuous training and recruitment of specialized profiles are key. For example, in 2013 AT&T launched its “Future Ready” program, investing over $1 billion to train employees in cloud computing, coding, and data science. Audits of outdated infrastructures and manual processes are also essential for planning modernization efforts.
Adopt a progressive approach
Implementing industrialization requires significant effort and overcoming deep challenges. A gradual, step-by-step approach is essential: test, industrialize in phases, and gradually generalize practices. Demonstrating incremental value and gains helps build support across the organization. Companies that succeed recognize these challenges and implement proactive strategies, investing in time, resources, training, and well-designed change management.
Industrialization is a powerful lever for business performance, but it must be approached thoughtfully. Rather than a purely technological initiative, it should focus on creating value for business operations and enhancing the customer experience.
Industrialization within Talisker’s four transformation levers
-
Customer experience: Automation improves user experience by streamlining interactions. Implementing conversational AI further enhances responsiveness and replaces manual processes with intelligent interactions.
-
Management teams: Cultural and managerial changes are essential to support transformation. We help clients onboard and adapt to new tools and methods, fostering cohesion around industrialization objectives.
-
Innovation: Industrialization provides a framework for testing new approaches, questioning traditional practices, and running pilot projects to explore new methods.
-
Digitalization: Digitalizing business processes through technology platforms transforms operations. Initiatives like DevOps unify IT and business, automate processes, and enhance organizational agility.
Let’s discuss your industrialization initiatives!
