The focus on organizational readiness, together with a culture shift towards acceptance of digital transformation initiatives within the company, and working out efficiencies in advance, comes from a survey from by Appian and DevOps.com.
The survey finds that digital transformation projects in businesses can stall because organizational preparedness. There is also the issue of how open employees are to the idea of change and the move to digital technologies. If employees are not taken on the technological journey then progress is slow, either through a lack of training or due to resistance to change.
The other important finding is with delivering efficiencies. The expectations as to what a new technology can deliver need to be mapped out in advance otherwise the expected results are not necessarily delivered. The point here is that simply buying artificial intelligence or an Internet-of-Things device or opening multi-channel content will not instantly transform a business if it is improperly configures or where the goals have not been mapped out sufficiently.
The concerns about efficiency and planning come from the Appian and DevOps.com survey 463 enterprises. The results reveal many businesses reporting how they are hamstrung by inefficient processes that slowdown the anticipated benefits of digital transformational initiatives.
This can also arise due to too fast a pace of change, where companies are overwhelmed by so-termed technical debt and the level of support required. Technical debt, according to ZDNet, is “the costs and complexity that grow as a result of constant short-term fixes and overlays.”
The focus on strategy is supported by management consultants MTS Sloan, who note how the effectives of digitally reimagining a business is determined by how well thought out the digital strategy is. The strength of a digital transformation strategy is with the scope and objectives. A major mistake for businesses is to simply focus on individual technologies and yet to continue to have strategies that are corporate wide in focus. Instead digital strategies and the technologies need to come together with the goal of transforming the business.
This also needs to be supported by business leaders who can foster an organizational culture that helps employees to embrace the change. One important thing called out in the MTS Sloan analysis is that employees in digitally maturing organizations need to be very confident in their leaders’ digital fluency.
