(Don’t) focus on digital transformation

Asking someone to keep their mind off something everybody wants may be bold.

Truth is that the straight way is not always the fastest way.

We see organizations are being hastily pushed into digital transformation, to become data-driven, to achieve competitive differentiation and the necessary advantage to thrive in a rapidly evolving complex business landscape.

Yet for 95% of these organizations the result falls short from the objectives.

5% of organizations that achieve their objectives when embarking in a digitization processes is a dramatic number but seeing that 75% will settle for dilution of value and mediocre performance is even more troubling.

75% of organizations involved in digital transformation efforts are confronted with a situation where they simply assume that the investment was wasted and worse than that, accept to live with mediocre, under-performing solutions – expensive failures.

Putting it in plain terms – 75% of the organizations GIVE UP.

Challenges

All this is relatively new, we're still gripping to understand what digital is, starting to recognize the huge amount of impact digital will have. Trying to recognize the scale of the effort required to drive those changes. Organizations face massive challenges to enact the changes needed to make that digital leap.

These are the most frequently identified challenges organizations face when taking on transformation projects and, if you experienced any of these challenges, you can, at least, have the comfort to know you’re not alone.

• Lack of cross organization involvement
• Lack alignment with business goals and benefits
• Organizational change
• Legacy systems
• Lack of focus
• Lack of digital literacy
• Understanding customer expectations
• Data privacy
• Lack of Talent
• Security

The digital transformation process should never actually end, it should be a continuous improvement process, and more important is should not be a project, but a continuous stream of projects.

Focus on quick, strategic wins

The transformation process that leads to a data driven organization must be wholeheartedly supported on the business strategy and objectives.

The purpose of any transformation process is to create business value, so the transformation strategy, must be oriented towards the organization's strategic priorities and key business objectives.

It must be the business prerogative to determine what are the priorities and objectives of the transformation, specially when most of the transformations tend to be customer oriented, and who better that the business to have the necessary awareness and knowledge of the customers’ expectations.

Being this a business-driven transformation, all these initiatives should be driven and oriented by the business units and grounded on clear business use cases – aligned with strategical business objectives.

Start with small, targeted initiatives, where the business impact and value can be clearly identified – The transformation success, is dependent on business success – create success stories and communicate them across the organization, they will act as a motor to leverage the replication of that story in other business units.

Assess the current situation, with special focus on these three vectors: people, process, and technology to clearly identify and timely address the existing gap in all the requirements for a successful initiative.

Apply an agile development mindset to all this process, start with a minimum viable solution and iterate, allow that visible results are presented in short time lapses.

Look at each tree

When thinking at a strategic level, being able to look at the forest, without focusing on each of the individual trees, but when growing the forest, each tree is important. Each tree that is planted and nurtured will bear fruit and will give its contribution for new trees to grow.

Digital transformation can be developed organically, this approach will create traction and will end-up acting as the motor from within the organization transformation that will grow organically out of the initial iteration.