Great article by the Boston Consulting Group on how, so many, digital transformations seem to be controlled by technology. Article after article want to talk about this technology or that often this is driven by a technology vendor and their agenda. In other words, you buy a shed load of stuff from them and "hey presto" you have purchased a digital transformation.
Digital Transformation is hard work it requires more from on an organisation in terms of it's people and processes than it does of the technology. Do you have the right people and processes for starters.
Here are Digital Leadership Associates (DLA) we take C-Level people (the Board as we call it in the UK) through a strategy session. This isn't about teaching senior people how to Tweet. We take the leadership team, through a set of exercises so they understand the strategic imperative of social and digital, the competitive advantage they can gain and incremental revenue uplift opportunity. That then sets a base level understanding and a business case that can be communicated across the business.
One of the exercises we undertake is looking at the blockers to such a project. By doing this, the team can look at the action plan that needs to be under taken to unblock.
In this article it talks about the complexity trap and it's often what companies fall into and then this brings the project to a grinding halt as people think it's "too hard".
Digital transformation isn't about IOT, Cloud, SaaS or whatever technology is flavour of the month, it's about you and your leadership setting a new trajectory and evolving. Buying a new set of tech just hard wires you to a direction that may be good, it might not be good.
Successful transformation is as much about people and processes as it is about technologies. That’s why businesses must take a comprehensive and systemic approach that focuses on all three dimensions simultaneously. The best way to do this is from the inside. An external vendor may know a technology but won’t likely understand how a business, not to mention its culture, works at the deepest level. Without a rich internal perspective, companies can’t easily achieve the kind of fast, at-scale transformation that provides a competitive advantage. Businesses need applications that are “just right” for users; the ability to extract value from data throughout the organization; and processes and organizational structures that fit with new technologies—and vice versa.
https://www.bcg.com/en-gb/publications/2018/take-control-digital-future.aspx
unknownx500
