Four Proven Tactical Methods for Reversing the Tide of Digital Transformation Disappointment

The technology trade press has been flooded in recent weeks with articles around the ongoing struggles companies endure on their digital transformation journey. While nearly every company is in the midst of a transformation, the vast majority are facing significant obstacles to success. Digital transformation is too big to fail, so companies need to adopt proven strategies that deliver successful outcomes.

Ipsos recently reported 79% of the organizations are formally tackling digital transformation but 90% are facing major hurdles. A new IDG study reports 51% of programs have stalled or been abandoned. Even more alarming is the fact that about 20% of the respondents said their company’s digital transformation efforts are a waste of time. It’s gotten so bad that CIOs are pumping the brakes on “Big Bang” programs and shifting resources to more measured approaches to innovation.

It should not be this hard, but change is difficult, especially at the enterprise level. Challenges to digital transformation success are varied. The most common issues cited involve:

• Employee Resistance
• Limited In-House Expertise
• Organizational Structure
• Lack of Overall Strategy
• Limited Budget

One key takeaway to note: the availability of technology is NOT the issue as internal factors are the primary driver of failure. 

Too often, the commonly proposed solutions to address digital transformation challenges lack the robustness necessary to succeed. Leaders are told to communicate better, fail faster, build capabilities, hire talent, improve culture, and other similar generic recommendations. These responses are not enough, because they treat the symptoms and fail to address the cause. 

Companies win at digital transformation when they have a tangible vision, aspirational technology outlook, defined approach to innovation, and visual portfolio of core assets. These are four proven tactics introduced below. 

High Beam Vision

In these times of high-velocity change, leaders need to see into the future to avoid miscalculations, and the ones that that are able to see the future most clearly have the most success. High beam vision allows leaders to accurately see the road ahead and make sound decisions regarding their organization’s future. Just like high speed drivers, today’s leaders must use a “high beam” strategy to maximize their performance. It helps them to look farther down the road than anyone else and understand how to take their teams along with them.

Developing a strategy and the capability to spot trends and react to them is a core tenet of high beam vison. Leaders need to be able to take advantage of a trend or defend against its negative impact. Becoming a high beam leader takes effort. The process involves staying current on trends that will impact the market, tying these trends to your organizational strategy, and developing a robust investment portfolio.

High beam vision is not an innate skill. It takes time to develop, but it can be learned. How do you start building this superpower? 

1. Identify Trends – Identify macro, industry, and organizational trends that will be impactful and forecast how they will affect your company  
2. Vision the Future – Build an illustration of what the future will look like based on the trends and connect the image to your organizational strategy
3. Create Rivers of Information – Develop an ability to digest and redistribute valuable information from the massive knowledge flows that exist to create a competitive advantage 
4. Develop an Action Plan – Create a blueprint on how to guide your organization into this future and seize opportunities for growth through a robust technology investment portfolio 
5. Share the Vision – Communicate this outlook with colleagues to inspire and motivate the whole organization with a collective view of the future

With clear eyes into the future, leadership can make better decisions regarding technology investments and start winning the digital transformation battle.  

Technology Guideposts

Guideposts are strategic, aspirational statements that guide efforts and investments. They are not goals; they’re broader than goals. Guideposts target areas for competitive advantage that narrow the focus of technology strategy. They are designed so investments of time and money make a true market impact.

Guideposts differ from goals because they are long-range, big concepts that dictate the more detailed elements of executing with technology on a day-to-day basis. As an example, a goal would be, “we want to build a database with one million names in it.” A guidepost, however, is, “we want to be the best in our industry at growing our database of names.” The former is a one-time goal; the latter is focused on building a tangible asset long term.

Consider this real-world example of the difference between a guidepost and a goal:

The first Walmart opened in July 1962 - a mere four months after the first Kmart opened its doors. While Kmart and Walmart were born at the same time, in the same market, with fairly similar concepts, Walmart has become the largest company in the world with $495B in sales in 2018, while Kmart sales dropped from $31B in 2004 to $6B in 2018 when it declared bankruptcy. 

Sam Walton’s original mission for Walmart was “to give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same things as rich people.” 

Kmart’s growth-oriented goal was “$12B in sales by 1980.” 

Hopefully you can see the difference.  

So why are guideposts so important?

• Strategic Foundation – Guideposts provide a fertile ground for a company’s long-term strategies. They are the foundation upon which your business and technology strategies are developed.
• Organizational Alignment –Your leadership and staff across the organization can use guideposts as a common ground to align the organization on a unified mission.
• Technology Investment –Guideposts will focus investments on things that are going to move the needle. By continuously evaluating necessary technology investment against your guideposts, you can align your technology strategy to support your ability to win in the market.

Systematic Innovation

Corporate innovation is one of the things that everyone talks about it and claims to be an expert, but nobody really knows how to do it or is actually doing it. In reality, innovation is not really that difficult. The challenge is most companies do not have the formalized innovation processes despite a leadership team that understands the necessity of innovation to win long term in the market. When innovation does occur, it happens in pockets or bursts, and it cannot be relied upon in a regular cadence that delivers regular results.

You need to think about innovation needs as a continuum between ideas and execution. Companies need a suite of innovation programs that can be run at regular intervals to both keep ideas flowing and make them operational. Some organizations need more help with generating ideas. Others need more assistance with the execution phase of innovation. Some organizations need a mix.

From more idea-focused to more operational-focused, here are five innovation tools that we deploy to nurture innovation.

• Innovation Convocation – Taking a cue from TEDx Talks, this event helps companies mine ideas and find new paths to pursue. Employees apply to present their ideas in 15-18 minute talks. With a judging panel and award process, not only do participants find real-world value in speaking but companies also garner ample ideas to pursue.
• Think Tank – These boutique conferences act as modern-day technology salons and offer a unique opportunity for leaders to get together to consider a critical future trend and how it will impact their organization and industries. The events are highly interactive with breakout exercises, including experiential learning, perceptual mapping, brainwriting and idea trials, to explore the impact of the topic from all angles.
• Hackathon – With their origins in the world of computer programming, hackathons offer a way to focus an intense amount of effort in a short amount of time toward tackling specific and complicated business challenges. The events get people, who might not normally be thinking about a different department’s challenge, on the task.
• Shark Tank – The corporate version works much like the popular reality TV show. Employees apply to pitch their innovation concepts to a group of executives who ultimately decide whether or not to invest in an idea after explaining what they liked and disliked about the concept. The events are great morale boosters and tend to generate more out-of-the-box ideas than traditional brainstorming sessions.
• Innovation Bootcamp – This two-day workshop jumpstarts the process of transforming an idea into a functional solution. People apply to participate and come together in a location away from distractions of their day job where they can focus and get briefed on how to develop their innovation. Internal and external advisors are onsite to mentor and provide feedback to participants. 

Innovation is not natural element in most company’s DNA. Change is hard. Any of these programs can kickstart an innovation mindset by providing a systematic process for exploring new ideas. 

Digital Enterprise Strategy

Today, every business is a digital business. Unfortunately, some don’t know it yet. From the small agile startup to the long-established enterprise, no organization is immune from the necessity to transform digitally. Technology has fundamentally altered how every company has to operate, while at the same time, technology has also shifted individual expectations of brand interactions. This concurrent inside-out and outside-in role of technology is the cornerstone for digital’s exponential impact on our all of our organizations and society as a whole.

Although a digital enterprise strategy (DES) is about future-proofing your business, a majority of companies do not have a DES in place. Just 1/3 of CIOs Deloitte interviewed had a DES. This is shocking on its own. But, when you consider that only 8% of executives believe their existing business model will remain economically viable through digitization, according to McKinsey, the fact that so many companies do not even have a DES is all the more concerning. 

While there are many elements to a DES, companies who continue to thrive in the digital transformation are consistently doing four distinct foundational steps well, and they continue to improve their abilities over time. Conversely, organizations that don't have the critical elements of relationships, processes, systems and data documented in a sharable and up-to-date visual format struggle to execute in areas where they want to improve, much less, attempt something revolutionary.

• Map Your Journeys – Today’s customers are craving something deeper than face value products – they want a connection with brands. Companies must understand every part of the customer journey and the customer’s expectations before adding more technology to their arsenal. Customer understanding enables an organization to adopt technology that will drive change. You can’t know where to go if you don’t have a map. Understanding experiences will drive the digital transformation in your organization. 
• Map Your Processes – Business process management addresses the processes that enable digital transformation, providing a constant method of improving and innovating the way work gets done. In order for your digital transformation initiative to succeed, it is imperative for your organization to change the way it does business, including a critical examination of processes.
• Map Your Systems – System diagramming and blueprinting, as well as evaluating your present and future state technology system outlook, should dovetail with your mapped relationships and mapped processes. This is the where you connect the dots from customer experience, to employee experience, to technology infrastructure and consider how to tune your holistic technology strategy to drive your organization's long-term prosperity. 
• Map Your Data – The one constant to the disruption of digital transformation is the massive increase in available data. To be successful, the data needs to be mastered. Since digital transformation runs on data, properly managing the diverse types and profuse quantities of that data will directly impact an organization’s ability to succeed and survive. Properly governed, data becomes the source of truth used between internal systems, applications, and processes as well as externally between enterprises.

Given the high stakes and likelihood of failure, leaders have a duty to their colleagues, investors, partners and customers to do everything in their power to successfully navigate their digital transformation. It should start with adopting proven tactics to win. At every level, enterprise change is difficult. Leaders can benefit from a tangible future view, aspirational technology target, defined approach to innovation, and documented visual portfolio of core assets to increase their chance of success. Hope is not a strategy for the digital age.   

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Jon Knisley helps leading brands stay competitive in the digital age by leveraging technology to amplify profits and mitigate risk. He can reached at [email protected].