Overcoming Transformation Fatigue
A report by SAP revealed that 84% of executives believe that digital transformation is critical to their survival. But only 3% say they have completed their transformation efforts. Despite starting with the best intentions, many companies are beginning to show signs of fatigue. But what could be choking their progress?
Many businesses made the mistake of jumping on the transformation bandwagon without thinking about the commitment required to make it a success. They wrongly assumed that they could update a few things and tick the box so they can move on to the next value add project. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that, and digital transformation is a journey, not a destination.
It's about people, not technology.
A resistance to change can be found surrounding the corporate culture in businesses of all sizes. A failure to guide your employees along the change curve will make it difficult for them to embrace. It also creates other problems that make it challenging for you to achieve your goals.
Advances in technology are indeed happening at a rapid rate, and it can be a struggle trying to keep up with the pace. But the even more uncomfortable truth is that it will never move this slow again. For businesses to continuously evolve, it will need a digital mindset throughout the entire organization.
At the beating heart of every company is people. Every team must be united by leaders to meet the rising expectations of their customers in both B2C and B2B environments. By failing to get employees to see their vision, many enterprises have created more problems than they set out to solve after becoming distracted by the shiny allure of technology.
People, processes, company culture, and mindset are the secret ingredients that turn every digital transformation into a success story. These essential factors are one of the biggest reasons your digital strategy has stalled.
You can only improve what you measure.
In a CIO survey, research firm Gartner unsparingly revealed that digital initiatives remain a top priority. In fact, only 4% of organizations have no digital initiative at all. As the conversation enters the mainstream, many are chasing the dream of reaching digital maturity.
By contrast, an earlier Gartner survey from 2017 first highlighted that nearly half of CEOs didn't have any metrics around their digital business transformation efforts. Most leaders would agree that you can only improve what you measure. Despite this knowledge, many embraced the evolutionary disrupt before you get disrupted tactic without a baseline or meaningful metrics in place.
In the beginning, many companies quickly achieved temporary improvements. But the absence of extensive metrics is now preventing them from achieving long-term success. Removing data silos by adopting digital tools that increase the accessibility of information across an entire organization can help determine what needs to be measured and improved.
Real-time data can provide you with one version of the truth that can be reported in metrics that monitor your progress. Data-based decision making plays a critical role in speeding up your transformation efforts and finally move away from technology that over-promises and under-delivers.
Aligning your digital transformation goals
Are your teams cross-functional and focussed on the same goals or outcomes? Many started their digital transformation journey with a shared vision. But when the honeymoon period came to an end, teams quickly retreated to the safe haven of their own incentive structures.
Meaningful digital improvements can only be achieved by aligning senior leadership teams, middle-level managers, and employees. Ideally, you should already have a digital transformation team consisting of representatives across your entire organization.
Collaboration provides a broader understanding of the challenges ahead from every perspective. A shared vision towards a defined business goal should be the driving force behind any technology-assisted change.
Playing the long game with your digital transformation strategy.
If you are serious about achieving digital maturity, it's time to think beyond than short-term profits. At the beginning of your journey, you were focussed on improving the ability to meet your customer's rising demands. By playing the long game, you can also begin building a more competitive business for the future.
Improving customer experience, operational efficiency, and increasing productivity are predictably big incentives for businesses. Although there will be a series of challenges along the way, the good news is that you are surrounded by vast amounts of data that will help you unlock the secrets of what you need to do to succeed.
Your website traffic is just the beginning. Engagement metrics around likes, shares, referrals, and conversions all demand that your company respects the power of data. If you follow their virtual breadcrumbs that your audience leaves behind, it can help you ensure that your digital transformation doesn't stall or fail.
However, there are endless successful digital transformation stories of businesses that innovated and created superior customer experiences. These are the stories that should inspire you on your journey and reinforce the fact that behind the technology, its actually people driving business transformation in a digital age.
Strategy - Leadership - Transformation
4 年Great article Brent.. having a digital mindset is key and especially needed at the most senior levels. Without it that corporate resistance to change will emerge as you say.. and at worst it becomes a corporate "immune response" as existing command and control power bases and governance processes "react" to the change being suggested and starve the initiative of people and money …? in essence cutting off the transformation air supply. You're right that a business doesn't really 'complete' its transformation, rather it becomes 'digitally mature' which enables it to be more automatic in its (digital) responses and less consciously working at being digital.. as you say, because its mindset is by default digital then it's default approach is user centric. Measurement is key and finding the right things to measure is hard. Businesses need to start with benefits and outcomes … not just input or output measures. One of our key measures is a kind of net promoter score; asking our teams "on a scale of 1-10 how consistently do you feel able to do your best work". There is a story behind why we landed on this which is too long to go into here, but it stands along side other indicators like paper use, travel and subsistence spend, staff turnover and absenteeism.. operational delivery KPIs like Net promoter and satisfaction etc need to be there too. But there is a subtle difference between what a business measures and what it is measured by. Becoming a digitally mature business also means that a business is a comfortable place for digital professionals to work in. Ask those people how easy it is to work in a modern, agile, digital way. If the digital teams work in a kind of incubator or stand out as something very different in both the area where they work and the way in which they work then the business is probably not digitally mature. This means that, as you say, Transformation is about people..? businesses can't just "buy it in" they need to train leaders to embrace servant leadership, they need to create activity based workspaces, embrace and encourage flexible working and use technology and digital tools to enable collaborative ways of working. If digital transformation were just process re-engineering with a funky new name, it would be a lot easier.. but its not.. at its heart it's cultural change which makes it a whole lot harder"
Very interesting Brent, I constantly come across companies that go through "transformations" for what feels like the sake of it. I believe companies and stakeholders need to understand the value and benefits before they undertake such "transformation"