Apparently keeping up with the digital world is the main concern of most CEOs. However, it is estimated that 70% of the investments in digital transformation went to waste.
I believe that main reason is directly related to the fact that technologies provide the ability to do stuff. But it doesn't do it effectively. In order to put technology to good use you need to change people's mindset, business models and internal procedures.
It is funny that some organizations that claim to embrace digital transformation still do not allow their employees to freely access some of the biggest websites in the world :)
Here are some thoughts about embracing digital transformation.
1: Change to a startup culture.
Agile. Fast decision making. Flat organizations. Prototyping and testing.
2. Use champions from within the organization. The best way to fail is to allocate the same task to many people or even better, to nobody. There is nothing wrong with external consultants, but they simply cannot replace a champion of the project that is a member of the organization.
3. Do not buy things before figuring out perfectly what to do with them.
I have seen one organization investing into 3kE/ month licenses, whitout any clear plan on how to use them. One year later, they still pay the licenses but use the software at 5% of its capacity
4: Explain employees that they are not being replaced.
Every employee will tend to naturally resist change, especially if it feels that it may threaten his job, hoping that by his resistance will convince the management to abandon the effort.
5. Design user journeys, UX and UI starting with the consumer, not with the company.
Designing an website or an app to match what the organization can do now does not mean that consumers will embrace it by default. If consumers want something else it's the organization that needs to adapt its processes in order to be able to produce something useful to the people.
This post is based on a series of articles from HBR and TrendWatch.
