Do you really NEED ‘digital transformation’?
Timothy Harfield
?? Head of Product Marketing @ ORO Labs ?? Founding Editor @ Biochar Today ?? Farmer @ Wallace Eventing
The language that is most commonly used to describe ‘digital transformation’ makes a crucial mistake. It treats ‘digital transformation’ as a thing. More than a thing, ‘digital transformation’ is talked about as a thing that businesses need and can consume. The result is a framing of business problems along the following lines:
- Businesses need ‘digital transformation’ to survive
- Your business does not have ‘digital transformation’
- Therefore, unless your business invests in ‘digital transformation’ now, it will not survive.
That’s super scary.
Framed in this way, technology vendors, consultants, and industry analysts will use the concept of ‘digital transformation’ to define a problem that businesses didn’t know they had, in order to sell them products and services they might not need.
But the problem is NEVER that a business lacks ‘digital transformation.’ Digital transformation is never an end in itself. True, some kinds of technology and certain types of transformation may be required to solve particular business problems, but until those actual problems are defined, it is impossible for a business to know whether ‘digital transformation’ is necessary, or to even know what it means.
So let’s stop talking about ‘digital transformation.’ Instead, let’s put in the hard work necessary to understand our business challenges, and to seek out the right solutions. Let’s stop talking about ‘digital transformation,’ and instead talk about problem-solving using any and all resources we have available, digital or otherwise.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you think of all your problems like they require digital solutions, those are the only ‘solutions’ you will see. Let’s not limit ourselves. Instead, let’s adopt a more holistic perspective that looks to solve well-understood problems using any and all available resources. This includes the digital, of course, but in a way that intentionally complements more analogue solutions like people and processes as well.
I help people achieve their financial goals.
5 年Great little piece, Timothy. So many of us struggle with this concept because vendors do a great job of selling "bright shiny objects" and we take it hook, line and sinker because we are always looking for the easy fix.