Digital Transformation - Only actions can turn buzzword into reality

In last decade, almost all organizations at some point started the digital transformation. The objective of digital transformation has been different depending on how the transformation start. Many businesses believe that moving workloads to the cloud or deploying SaaS technologies to replace legacy business processes are transformative. Yet, there are other modernization efforts that may support a more significant transformation. To me digital transformation is more profound. One definition which continues to catch my attention is - Use of technology to change how a business operates and deliver experience to its customers. The customers can be clients or consumers or employees.

I am sure that each one of us have been part of some transformation and also have tasted success and failure in it. Research shows that many efforts to fundamentally change the trajectory of an organization fail. Research shows that 70% of transformations fail. Contributing factors include insufficiently high aspirations, lack of engagement within the organization, or insufficient investment in building capabilities across the organization to sustain the change, among others. To me such programs are always iterative or test and learn. An iteration of any such well thought program pushes the organization to the next orbit and much nearer to its end goal.

I see few fundamental actions required for each phase of transformation

1. Start with a purposeful strategy and a business outcome in mind - Many a times the programs become implementation programs. It is important to align the technology priorities with business strategy. The implementation of a technology or a process or an operation need to provide a business outcome.
2. Many a times business organization focus only on operational excellence. Which at time means that build mindset & architecture takes a back seat. It is important to ensure that tech and data architecture are modern and flexible. The organization will have to keep that accountability.
3. People and capabilities have to be the fulcrum. We often put importance on skills like leadership, communication or organizational, with the expectation being that those skills will ensure the initiative is well-led, communicated and organized. But when organization lack domain experience, we find it challenging to "lift" the transformation. Key here is to balance the domain, leadership, modern tech, business and communication skills by right training, engagement, hiring, communication and partnership engine.
4. Deliver at speed and adopt at scale. Almost all big organizations are multinational, multi department and have created process to ensure good governance at scale. Now we have become its prisoner. The key here is not to lose outcome of governance but to ensure we don't duplicate, triplicate governance.
5. Environment of Trust and celebrating others milestone. Any such transformation will be multiyear, spanning across numerous business and tech teams across geographies. In such environment, trust is difficult to come by as the outcomes and process will be grey to start with. As a transformation agent it is important that we push trust across. As outcomes could be long drawn and distant (many times), it is important to celebrate interim milestones as a team. These are marathons and marathons need to be paced correctly.