The Wall Street Journal recently published an article declaring that directors and executives believe the business environment will be faced with even greater challenges in the coming year, particularly around Digital Transformation. Organisations that have been around for many years have become the digital laggards and are finding it increasingly difficult to transform or become like those that are born in the digital age and taking advantage of digital technologies that are available and are instead grappling with old legacy systems. Similarly, Forbes also recently stated that 70% of all digital technology initiatives do not reach their goals. Both articles however contained similar reasons for the challenges and failures organisations face, noting that while transformations often do not achieve their goals, the key reasons for this are that digital transformation often forgets that it is about people, not the technology.
Enterprisers Project claim three reasons that digital transformations fail which include:
- Lack of up front commitment, either unwilling to continue the success from the first phase or unwilling to continue to push the organisation further along the path from fear of resistance.
- Failing to take the iterative approach, which often results in a long-term project resulting in the organisation suffering fatigue before achieving results.
- Putting technology at the forefront, which often leaves out the user experience and fails to bring people along for the journey.
HBR offers two reasons for the failure of digital transformation projects which include the unspoken disagreement among the executive resulting in them being not aligned. With the misalignment of the goals, the digital transformation project ultimately fails, while the second reason proffered is the disparate capabilities between the ability to launch a pilot, which is often a success and requires a much smaller commitment than the much larger enterprise approach when scaled up.
A look from another angle finds that there are many approaches to be able to do digital transformation correctly, interestingly the same sources writing about the failures also have gathered insights into that which is needed for their success. Forbes for example discusses the digital transformation failure of many organisations with Michael Gale from PulsePoint group who claimed:
“One of the most basic impediment to moving forward on the road to digital transformation is whether or not enough people within the organization are aware of the challenges. Because if they’re not aware of the challenges the probable truth becomes they’re either going to trip up, fall over and be massively disappointed when it comes to doing it. Basic awareness about those challenges is probably the key indication of how well the process will be successful.
Its quite clear when addressing both the reasons for failure and the bricks of success and that is people. A review of as many failures and successes as you can find and that one constant becomes apparent and that is people. Getting the people component right is the key ingredient and fail that, then digital transformation is just not going to work. Enterprisers Project even outlines four different types:
- Connectors who are those people that can make the right connections across the organisation
- Challengers who constantly seek question, raise and offer suggestions of continuous improvement (these are the people that often say ‘why dont we do this instead’.
- Agilists who adapts to the changes and help to move in the new directions that are required to take advantage of the changes in technology and processes.
- Navigators help the organisation by being constantly aware of the next technology trend and drive towards that next great change.
Finally, as with any technology project, the people need to be brought along for the ride. Its not about the technology, and if the transformation is made about the technology it will fail.