That is, what are the qualities, principles, cultural characteristics…and more an organization should have in place to increase chances for success with a digital transformation initiative?
It’s more than digital tools or infrastructure, although these are important. In this article, we discuss 3 elements critical to any digital transformation.
For a digital transformation initiative to succeed, an organization needs a conducive culture, which means it has the following characteristics:
“Culture” is how people and groups within the organization think about themselves and each other. “Organizational qualities” is how the company as a whole studies a problem and reaches a solution. With the right culture in place, organizational qualities that are essential to the success of a digital transformation can be fostered. The two most important organizational qualities for a successful digital transformation are creative-thinking and design-thinking.
Creative thinking – “Out-of-the-box thinking” is willingness to step outside conventional boundaries to look at a problem from new angles. Doing so enables organizations to come up with novel, non-obvious solutions.
The smartphone is an excellent example. Instead of creating a device that was primarily a phone with cool features, Apple re-imagined their device as a platform that could do almost anything. They employed independent developers for that platform, and it paid off. For example, voice-calling is one of the device’s many capabilities, not the central purpose of the device. The result was a revolution in mobile devices that may have led to Blackberry irrelevance.
Digital transformation, by definition, involves the application of digital technologies to enable business transformation. Therefore, tools and technologies are important to the success of a digital transformation initiative, and should have certain critical characteristics:
In addition, digital infrastructure can be highly important to the success of a digital transformation. Does the organization have the computing resources on-site to implement a digital solution? If the design involves offloading the computational heavy-lifting to cloud-based services, do you have sufficient network bandwidth to support the communication with the cloud services across the internet? Would it be advantageous to implement edge computing resources to reduce bandwidth requirements? Answers to these questions, among others, are important to making digital transformation a success. It’s not just about the software.
It’s tempting to characterize digital transformation as “only a software problem” or “just an IT problem,” throw some technology at it, and call it art. Approaching digital transformation this way is a recipe for disaster. Without a critical examination of current business processes to see where they are wasteful or add little or no value, a digital transformation runs the risk of automating processes that shouldn’t be.
Digital technologies are obviously at the heart of any digital transformation for business benefits. But without organizational culture and qualities in place, a digital transformation can fail. You may not be “transforming” anything; you’re digitally enabling a process that does the wrong things faster.
Before embarking on any digital transformation initiative, your organization should look at itself critically, realistically and determine if you have the directional organizational aptitude to successfully implement a digital transformation. If you don’t, you need to begin now to get there.