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For decades, businesses have wrangled with the problem of how to successfully pursue a digital transformation. From the start of the era of widespread connectivity, to the birth of omnichannel e-commerce, to the emergence of enterprise cloud computing, to today’s array of must-have new technologies, business success has relied on the ability to implement and leverage the latest necessities of the technological milieu.
But companies’ efforts to transform their operations and keep up with the technological curve consistently fall short. The numbers are not good. An estimated 70 percent of digital transformation efforts fail, according to a McKinsey study.
That means 70 percent of businesses are walking away from stalled attempts at technological revamps. They’re getting halfway there with implementation and then making do with barely adequate tech hodgepodges, accruing costs for technology that never gets used. As a result, these businesses are losing competitive advantage, working on legacy systems and dealing with the inefficiencies and inadequacies that come with them.
Your business, however, does not have to be among the 70 percent that follow this unsuccessful path.
There are a number of reasons that today’s businesses struggle so fundamentally with bringing, and keeping, their enterprises up to speed with the technological demands of their vertical. By taking a look at them, you’ll see how they come down mainly to a matter of mindset.
Unearthing the unhelpful mindsets that hide in plain sight, frustrating business’s aspirations for digital transformation, is what Guidewise’s Execution Intelligence Engine is built for.
So after we explore where digital transformations go wrong, we’ll explain how working with Guidewise is key to doing it right, putting your business in the category of those standout successes that make it happen.
Unsuccessful digital transformations often start from the wrong place. Businesses attempting to launch an initiative from one department, say IT or marketing, run into numerous issues.
Digital transformations can suffer deeply from confusion, even with the top brass on board. If you don’t have the right expertise in the room, then meetings occur with unclear objectives and fuzzy goals, resulting in a lack of action.
Digital transformation is as much about staff, their perspectives, and their “buy-in” as it is about new technology. When companies fail to appreciate this, they set themselves up for trouble. In cases where staff is not on board with the transformation, they get in the mindset of lamenting or ignoring the coming technological changes. They might even experience “change fatigue,” so unconvinced by the promises and unimpressed by the technologies being introduced, that they delete the emails, glaze over at the meetings, and resolve to wait it out and return to business as usual.
A lot can happen in a year or two. In the span of a single digital transformation initiative, industry-standard solutions can lose support, new industry-darling technologies can lose their luster, network architecture best practices can change, design aesthetics can shift, and these days it isn’t even too far out to say that entire paradigms can be upended. So if an enterprise approaches digital transformation as a “project,” with goals and deliverables that never get reassessed after day one, it’s possible to end up out-of-date at the “finish line.” Digital transformation today requires a regular reassessment of needs and how to address them.
The common problems we just looked at go a long way in explaining that dismal 70 percent statistic for digital transformation failure, and they’re all, on the most basic level, people problems. The McKinsey study further finds that “employee resistance or management behavior” is the major barrier to transformation success, and it is easy to imagine, in each instance above, how these factors are what put the brakes on.
Staff and leadership knowledge, attitudes, skills, and abilities all play into the success of a digital transformation, and having a clear view of all of this is critical to addressing potential people-based hurdles that can derail your transformation from the outset, or at any point along the way.
Guidewise’s Execution Intelligence platform gives you this view, which is why if you are planning a digital transformation and want to beat the odds, you should talk to Guidewise.
Our Execution Intelligence platform lets you assess, at the most granular level, how your teams are doing when it comes to digital transformation and the changes it brings.
With unparalleled data-driven insights, we can give you clear answers to these questions, from which you can get your entire staff organized and moving in the right direction, enthusiastic about the changes on the way, and treating digital transformation as an ongoing, living part of the business.
There has been a whiplash-inducing emergence of new enterprise technologies in the past few years. New business-critical technologies like AI are quickly growing so central to doing business, that soon undergoing a digital transformation, and getting it right, will be not just a good idea, but a true necessity. This is the future that business is facing, and we’re here to help you get ready.
The first step in a successful digital transformation is easy: talk to us! Schedule an Execution Intelligence consultation with us today to discuss details and get started on the right path.
And there is one more thing you’ll need to consider as your digital transformation gets under way; leadership. Businesses are facing change at an unprecedented pace thanks to the AI revolution, and excellent leadership is necessary at the helm to steer them through.
If you want to know more about what excellent leadership entails, our Ideas That Matter series on the Implementors podcast network is a great place to start.
In it, former Fortune 500 CEO, best-selling author, and Professor of the Practice of Management at Columbia Business School, Professor Willie Pietersen, joins Guidewise Co-Founder & CEO, Ted Wolf, to explore every facet of what makes great leaders stand out; insights every business will need as the changes keep coming! Watch the first episode now!
