How Not be Among the 70% of Organisation’s with Failed Digital Transformations?
Digital transformation is a journey, not a destination.
In times of uncertainty, leading through transformation is critical to business continuity. We’ve learnt that and more in the last two years. But digital transformation isn’t just about keeping up with the latest tech, it’s about operationalising iterative processes that enable continuous innovation.
In general, digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to create new — or modify existing — business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. It transcends traditional roles like sales, marketing, and customer service –beginning and ending with how you think about, and engage customers. MIT Sloan Management Review states that digital transformation is supported by three pillars:
- Customer Experience
- Operative Processes
- Business Model
Still, only 30% of transformation projects are successful. Before talking about how to make your transformation successful, let’s quickly look through why most of them fail.
Three reasons why digital transformations fail
A Mckinsey report says that even though digital transformation projects focus largely on technology, the reason for it’s failure is rarely technology. Below are the challenges most companies face.
Transformation strategy: Seems obvious, but it’s where quite a few businesses start to head down the route of failure. Logic dictates that starting with business-critical processes isn’t a great idea. The challenge, however, is that there isn’t a single formula to help organisations plan their journey. Like business needs, the tech stack supporting a business is also unique.
Aligning transformation with business opportunities: The second element that is often missed is. Restating MIT Sloan Management Review the three main pillars supporting a successful and sustained transformation circles around business and customer needs. Planning infrastructure improvements that don’t align with business opportunities significantly reduces adoption by teams.
People and culture: With hybrid work models becoming the reality of the day, gaining buy-in from your employees is essential to sustaining the transformation. Identifying the right set of tools that aligns with their day to day needs that improve processes and collaboration is key. A number of our clients who we’ve migrated to the Atlassian suite of tools have seen a significant improvement in both adoption and agility.
The secret to successful and sustained transformation
The answers to the six questions below allow organisations to take stock of the current and future needs while putting their customers first.
- Efficiency first, or customer experience first?
- How to balance safety and operational efficiency?
- How can digital really guide action?
- How should data be managed?
- How do you ensure that digital capabilities solve business problems?
- How to define data and precipitation capacity from the daily operation of the enterprise?
With these questions guiding their transformation strategy, one of our clients continues to innovate — answering their need to empower global R&D collaboration increasing operational efficiency and experience.
Their entire product life cycle including R&D, manufacturing, marketing, supply chain, after-sales service, finance, human resources, etc., can now collaborate on the R&D network. Not only have they been able to form an efficiency flywheel that covers all their processes. With this established, they are now able to focus on building their knowledge and capabilities to form a positive cycle. And this is just one of the success stories we’ve been a part of.
Enterprise agility is the result of bringing together vision, needs, leadership, and people. It begins with you and everyone sitting next to you and across the globe. Lead with people — employees and customers — at the heart of all decision-making.
