The Digital Challenge (part I)

Once I met the head of "digital" in a company which I will definitely not name. This person came from a well-known consulting company and had excellent PowerPoint skills. No kidding - the PowerPoint was flashy, eye-catching, inspiring and made people want to climb mountains. Ok, that last part was an exaggeration, but you get my point.

The issue is (from observation) that these people tend to be great on selling ideas, but poor on actually delivering anything. If becoming "digital" is an organisational strategy, then why do we fool around with people who only know PowerPoint?

The word "digital" has become a cliché in record time. To many IT folks it's a case of re-branding what has been happening for years but I think it goes beyond that.

George Westerman, MIT principal research scientist and author of Leading Digital: Turning Technology Into Business Transformation, puts it like this:

Digital transformation marks a radical rethinking of how an organization uses technology, people and processes to fundamentally change business performance.

It's important to understand the implications of this definition. As usual, it's a case of people, processes and technology. Do only the technology part and you'll fail. We also have to keep in mind that "people" includes not only our internal staff, but also customers and suppliers. In addition we have to think about how these people interact with each other (the processes) and what data is needed to underpin these interactions.

There are a number of factors making digital transformation hard. One reason is the "boring bits" that digital people typically don't understand and therefore undervalue: end-to-end processes, master data, integration of systems, carefully coordinated organisation touch points, not to mention scaling, security, mobile connectivity and so on ... To compound the difficulties, for large organisations spread over many countries, there will usually be very different levels of tech maturity, based on local conditions. What might work for highly developed and connected countries might not work everywhere.

Another key factor making digital hard is the people and processes changes required. It's one thing to convince customers to interact on line (even that can be a challenge, depending on your business), and quite another to put in place the business changes needed to support the shift to digital interactions. I'm talking about how what employees do on a daily basis must change. The shift to what is called a "digital mindset" will not be easy and yet it's critical to success.

I was quite harsh on the PowerPoint kings and queens earlier, but the fact that they are hired at all suggests a fundamental misunderstanding about what being digital is all about. It almost as if CEOs think that to be digital means to have a magical digital brush which he/she can use to paint over anything at all and voila!, we're digital. Some business leaders think that being digital means having a Twitter account or something similar. It would be funny if it wasn't so serious.

The point being that simply having a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) or even a digital team is nowhere near enough. Shifting processes to a digital way of working means complete company change. Which is why the process is called a "transformation" and why it's an immense challenge and deeply scary for most people.

(to be continued)