Q&A: The Prince's Trust's Rebecca Galambos on digital transformation

Rebecca Galambos is senior digital transformation director at the Prince’s Trust, with some valuable insights into the ‘millennial generation’ through her work. 

Rebecca will be speaking about this at our upcoming Shift event in London on May 24/25th. I’ve been asking Rebecca about what digital transformation means to her…

Can you give us a sneak preview of your presentation at Shift?

I’m going to be speaking about how digital transformation and frugal innovation are just as relevant to the third sector as to the world of commerce (arguably even more so given the tight funding environment).

How useful is the term ‘millennials’? Does it over-simplify a group of people with very disparate interests and needs? 

As with all stereotypes it is somewhat helpful but can quickly become a lazy shorthand…today more then ever the individual has to come to the fore. 

How do you target this market? What has worked for you? 

Simplicity in our branding. Bite sized communication. Meaning and depth of our messaging.

From the young people we work with, the lesson is that you have to be mobile-enabled. Good design , speed and simplicity matter. Apps that are tailored to your audience. Short, bite-sized communications Social is very important.

One important point is that young people are motivated by meaning. Whatever you are communicating, selling, or encouraging them to do has to have some meaning.

People more socially and economically aware. Inequality in wealth and opportunity is growing and roughly 800,000 young people in the UK are not in employment, education or training.

A lot of young people are very aware of socio-economic issues and are interested in products with meaning.

We also talk a lot to young people. For example, we have UX groups that try out different technology and ways of engaging with us. Then we have deeper research into how they’re feeling. Any organisation, whether selling or supporting young people, has to have a dialogue and keep it going.

What does digital transformation mean to you? 

It means nothing less then a total reinvention of an organisation’s business model through the lens of the customer whilst incorporating all the advantages which digital brings in terms of speed, agility, low cost and new models of customer interaction. 

How much of digital transformation is about technology and how much is about culture? 

There is an old saying ‘culture trumps strategy every time’ and I think that applies equally with digital.

Having said that digital also provides new and innovative ways of engaging with employees so done well can work with the grain of an organisation’s culture

What are the biggest obstacles to a successful transformation project? 

Stakeholder alignment – do the senior team share a common view of the goal…often they do superficially but once the detail emerges it can quickly be apparent that they are not aligned.  

What has worked for you at Prince’s Trust? 

Openness, innovation, frugality, light touch but inclusive governance, bring our customers (the young people) into all phases, design, development and testing.

It’s about understanding the customer journey and delivering value  for that customer. In our case, on my current programme, that means young people. I’ve been looking at simplicity, speed, and making things friction free to deliver the best possible experience. This drove me to look at transformation and digital change.

To me, transformation is combination of business process change, technology change and the change in ways of working. This used to be called change management and now we talk about transformation.

Perhaps one of the reasons for that is that we can now deliver a great package of technological change, as well as effectively restructuring teams and organisations. Only when when you put it all together and wrap around it with proper cultural change and ways of working that it really becomes attractive.

You have talk to people, no matter how good your process or methodology that you bring along is. That process is your pots and pans but its the ingredients that matter. It’s all about people and understanding whats important to them. Digital transformation starts with people.

Rebecca will be speaking about digital transformation at our Shift event in London on May 24/25th. You can also hear her on our latest Digital Marketing Podcast.