Taking the Hype (BS) out of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is BS. It’s marketing jargon put together by consultants and vendors trying to sell you on a vision of utopia. It also puts an unnecessary amount of strain on organizations to “keep up with the Joneses.” Guess what folks, most of the Joneses aren’t digitally transforming. What they are doing is attempting to evolve. Frankly, that’s a better approach and it is more in line with human nature. If we think about a transformation or metamorphosis, we’re talking about changing from one state to another, like a caterpillar to a butterfly. As a manufacturer of goods, are you suddenly going to stop selling products and sell data? Probably not.

We evolve regularly, both consciously and unconsciously from the day we’re born. Yes, we mark certain milestones and those can be bigger and more impactful, things like learning to walk, talk, read, do math. Well, doesn’t that mean then we’re transforming? No, we’re evolving.

“Transformation” efforts are by and large a farce. We’ve set ourselves up to fail. True transformation is all encompassing, it’s time consuming, and it’s hard. Great, let’s just go run a marathon tomorrow after no training, what could go wrong? We need to change our mindset; it’s evolving our use and understanding. That’s gradual, not transformational. It also involves doing the work. It requires going through the process.

Evolutionary change is agile. Regardless of the goal, it’s unlikely you will get there in one sprint or two. Back to the marathon concept, those training will take varying degrees of preparation. You build on the length of your runs. You may alter your diet and fluid consumption to help with recovery. You may find a group to help motivate. But what you don’t do is wake up and just run the marathon, no disrespect to Forrest Gump or Barney Stinson. What you do is evolve your habits to make that goal a reality. You make iterative progress.

We need to shift the conversation to evolving our processes, how we use data, and the training and expectations of our workforce if we want to experience the benefits of true digitization. They are not new concepts, not remotely. We’ve simply placed too much emphasis on shifting the workload from a mainframe to a desktop, then to smartphones and digital headsets. We’ve shifted the availability of information, storage, and the consumption engine.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, despite Moore’s Law and all its goodness, we’ve forgotten that fundamentals still matter. When Kennedy gave his speech at Rice in 1962 about going to the moon, he stressed that we were doing it because it was “hard.” That concept still exists, we just shy away from it. Changing the culture of an organization to embrace change is hard. Human nature makes it hard. Showing a true path to change via agile, incremental changes is what allows us to evolve and improve.

Let’s all give ourselves a break and stop trying to go for the moonshot, hell we didn’t get to the moon in a single shot, why should we expect to advance our business to be different. Change the mindset, change the result. Setting reasonable goals to improve, showing that you can sustain the improvement, and making that the baseline will get you much further in the long run. A 1% change per day yields far more growth than a 10, 20, or 30% improvement over the course of a year. If someone is promising you the moon, make sure they can at least get you off the launch pad.