Digital Transformation is not about Digital

Digital Transformation is not about Digital, no matter the wording. Nor is it about using a magical service management framework that will bring you exactly where you are told you want to be with your business. 

In the past few years, Digital Transformation (or Digitalization) has become all the hype. Multiple definitions have been given of it, which all suffer from a level of vagueness, but come down to using innovative digital technologies to provide new or improved services that actually provide (or co-create) value to consumers. 

Somehow, this was made to sound like a revolution happening, so many organizations jumped onto the bandwagon and started on their journeys towards Digital Paradise. Rule 1 of innovation is, after all, that you cannot stay behind if the competition starts doing something new. So we got a massive growth in the number of (mostly dysfunctional) chat bots, online ordering possibilities (with and without secure payment options), and next-day deliveries (if on stock), without fail followed by lengthy customer satisfaction surveys. Digital Paradise had arrived. 

Oh wait, realized the few companies that actually analyzed their customer satisfaction feedback, our customers are still not satisfied! And Oh no, realized other companies, we still cannot deliver our services at the price our customers demand. Let's outsource, offshore and automate more of our activities, then it will be alright. 

But hey, competitor A uses "modern" management methodologies, so we should do (not be) Lean (80 years old) , Agile (20 years old) , DevOps (10 years old) as well! After all, all current service management frameworks tell us so, so it must be the right thing to do. Fad of the day implemented, still no happy customers. Let alone happy employees, because we forgot to ask the employees how they felt about all these changes in the first place. 

Back to square one: what is necessary for true Digital Transformation? It is nothing to do with technology. After all, companies have been using technology to define new and innovative services for decades. We just called it "automation" instead of digitalization. Nor is it anything to do with picking a framework or methodology and hoping that that will fix all problems. I know more companies that made a total mess of their doing Lean or Agile than companies that were actually successful with it. This is not the fault of the methodology, but about companies confusing doing Lean or Agile and them being Lean or Agile. It's an attitude, after all, not a way of working. Furthermore, just because ITIL 4 or VeriSM tell you e.g. about something called Cynefin, this doesn't mean it will work for you. Nor will anything in their long lists of possible methodologies if it doesn't get embedded in the company's culture. Nor does the average executive care about any of these methodologies (they are in permanent crisis-management mode).

There you go: culture. I'm not a post-modernist (unless appropriate), so won't reduce everything to culture. However, what I do know is that a massive change such as Digital Transformation cannot succeed without a massive change in organizational culture. Such changes do not happen spontaneously, nor should they be initiated at the lower levels of an organization (I tried and failed multiple times). Cultural change starts at the top, with top management communicating (not preaching: communication is a two-way process) and gradually making the cultural change by convincing each employee how change benefits them, the customers, and the company, and what their contribution is to the success of the change. Without top management support, communication and cultural change, Digital Transformation is doomed to fail. This is why Digital Transformation is not in essence about digital: you can innovate as much as you want and deploy new technologies until you drop down, but if you don't have the motivated and customer-focused organisation behind it, your customers will find out soon enough that it is no more than an empty shell. 

(Thanks to Yvette Backer and Lex Scholten for an inspiring conversation today that led to this article).