Most of us are familiar with the terms greenfield and brownfield when describing IT projects. Greenfield describes a project that lacks constraints imposed by prior work and greenfield sites typically have little or no existing IT assets. Brownfield projects typically mean to start a project based on prior work or to rebuild (re-engineer) a product from an existing one or integrate a new technology into an existing IT ecosystem.

Recently I've started to use the term "minefield" to describe environments I'm most familiar with, i.e. those that have thousands of applications, many of which are critical or extremely important to the business and hundreds of technology dependencies much of which is legacy or heritage IT.

Simply maintaining minefield sites is costly, technically challenging and demands a huge cognitive effort across multiple disciplines. Attempting to transform minefield sites to take advantage digital and cloud innovation is a daunting exercise even for the most proficient technologists.

There are three techniques I have found that yield highly positive results in affecting transformation of such sites. Before discussing these approaches it is worth pointing out that these approaches align closely with the principles of KnowIT and readers can learn more about KnowIT from my previous post: 3 guiding principles for enterprise IT decision makers. I refer to the three techniques as: Innovative Appropriation, Accelerated Transformation and Community Development.

1. Innovative Appropriation refers to the process of identifying high-performing assets within the organization, and taking advantage of their skills and expertise at the beginning of the transformation project.

Identify the people, processes and organizations within the enterprise that excel and engage, emulate and incorporate these high performing assets into transformation planning. Innovative Appropriation helps to ensure the necessary buy-in from influential and competent members of the organization. It lays the foundation for our next technique Accelerated Transformation.

2. Accelerated Transformation helps you identify which applications you should transform. In this phase, you want to target the low-hanging fruit applications that will deliver high value. The goal of Accelerated Transformation is to deliver the Minimal Viable Product(s), allowing you to demonstrate early success.

3. Community Development: The Minimal Viable Product(s) are then elaborated using our third technique, Community Development. Community Development is arguably the most powerful technique for sustaining the transformation over time and ensuring the ultimate goal is delivered. Learning lessons from Community Software development, the formation of inter-disciplinary communities composed of users, managers, developers and vendors drives the development of the Minimal Viable Product(s) and just as importantly ensure adoption of the new services by the rest of the organization.

There are few technical challenges that a mature, diverse and enthusiastic community cannot overcome and the real bonus is the increase in adoption that arises from community efforts. All this delivered in a most cost efficient manner.

There are no guarantees for the success of large-scale digital transformations of minefield sites however, these three techniques will help to secure early success and chart a course that will avoid some of the most insidious traps that lie in the path from the current state to target state. By carefully applying these techniques successfully, initially on a small scale, and then simply focusing on eliminating the barriers to transformation you'll be surprised how quickly change can be catalysed and sustained over a multi year project, ultimately delivering the intended results.