Today's #1 mistake? Digital = tech.

We live in interesting times. Well over 70% of large enterprises complain that they don't derive enough value from digital in all its technology forms, from big data analytics and AI to mobile to cloud etc. Yet the opportunities are very clear, starting with overhauling customer experiences (try getting a home insurance quote from Lemonade, for instance). 

Where are most large companies going wrong? What is preventing them from identifying those key customer journeys and reimagining them?

They don't put the right people on the job. (Read on - this is not what you may think.) 

Digital is too often approached as a technology effort, as a new version of System Integration (SI). But technical realization, the core of system integration and the activity at the roots of today's IT services giants and many of their CIO clients, is not anymore the most complex part, or at least surely not the only complex part.

Yes, technology is incredibly important, and having people who understand the new tools is essential. But unlike in the old ERP days where one could implement much within a finite set of "suites", the digital era is about designing and weaving in agile and lightweight ways the new processes across many different parts of the organization - not just integrating and configuring systems. 

The world is very different today and most decision makers (and their advisors), raised in the old paradigm, haven't switched to the new one yet.

For instance, if you run an established insurance company (not a startup like Lemonade, who could write everything from scratch) you'll need to take care of the legacy that sits in a number of places: from where you touch the client (your website or the broker's, your marketing systems, your sales force or your channels), to the middle office where the risk decisions are sanctioned, to the back office where the finance groups assess the profitability of whatever you're selling. 

This isn't a system integration job - this is an enterprise orchestration job. It is a process redesign, and often a cross-enterprise one to at least some extent. If it is not done that way, the result may be anecdotal. It won't scale. And today, often it doesn't - because the CIO, or the line of business leaders, alone, aren't able to get it done as a proper business-IT, cross enterprise effort. The outcome: a lot of pretty mobile/web veneers, superficial layers that don't truly change the customer experience. And 79% of executives being unsure if digital has changed their world yet.

That's why we see the emergence Chief Digital Officers (CDO), trying to digitally rewire the company on behalf of CEOs. But CDOs are often tech-savvy external hires who lack the domain expertise and the political capital. And CEOs are generally not sufficiently savvy with business technology effort (few of them truly understand agile, or lean startup, for instance), not interested enough in the importance of process design, and ultimately end up being stonewalled by middle management who has become jaded with technology promises (too many over-sold and under-delivered ERP and BI/DW implementation), and impervious to traditional change management practices.

Analysts reports and ranking also largely miss the forest for the tree. Most of their assessments are centered around system integration capabilities, and mastery of user experience (UX). That's a (new and shiny) tool centered view - not one focused on the "job to be done".

When one spends enough more time firsthand in large enterprises operations, observing how they run, one would notice a few massive "blind spots": the inability to redraw processes end-to-end (hence optimizing parts of the customer experience, not the whole); the inadequate top-down change management; the creation of expensive analytical expertise islands tenuously connected to the rest of the organization, mostly through governance meetings and email and static presentations, or at best through a data lake; the hard slog of getting the organization to experiment new processes, or do "parallel runs" and pilots. 

These are huge hurdles in any project that doesn't fully manage to eliminate all human intervention. Most efforts don't. And in large enterprises that can't do away with some level of legacy operations and systems, this state of affairs explains why digital is often not changing the game.

An organization isn't a nicely defined sandbox, a staging environment able to accommodate the latest technology. The techie in us would like it to be, but it isn't. And irrespective of how many well-funded super-humans live in Silicon Valley, the sad truth is that many of them shy away from messy, human-ridden legacy environments prevalent in large enterprises. From big data to robotic process automation, most digital technology vendors and their ecosystem currently lack the ability to truly change large enterprises, to create new processes that can harness productively the new tools - at scale, beyond impressive yet anecdotal "proof of (technical) concept".

This is not primarily a technology problem. Digital is not primarily a technology problem.

That's why design thinking and lean principles, two methods that have been around for long, are proving so important in creating a platform for domain experts, technologists, data scientists, and marketers - to finish the job that digital technologists, alone, won't. 

What do you experience in your environment? Share your thoughts and follow the discussion on Twitter @ggiacomelli