Digital transformation has become essential for enterprise organizations to survive, but companies continue to fail at it. With 70 percent of digital transformations failing, businesses need to adopt a proven strategy to succeed. On top of that, according to an Everest Group study, 78 percent failed to also meet their business objectives.
Digital transformation has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years and should be a critical aspect to an organization’s success. Yet, digital transformation strategies continue to fail, even after they have invested more than $1 trillion in transformation efforts.
Here are 7 ways to make sure your enterprise organization succeeds at digital transformation:
Leaders need to get behind the transformation
CEOs and top leadership must get behind the transformation. CEO support for digital initiatives is important for securing an adequate digital transformation budget. And if CIOs act as proponents for change and education, leaders will have high level buy-in on both fronts. The CIO can convince everyone that this is the direction the organization should be going in order to keep leadership on the right track.
Culture must embrace change and collaboration
Cultural change is at the heart of digital transformation. Whether it’s technology, internal operations, new products and services, or how your organization engages with customers, digital transformation impacts every part of your organization. Every department, group, or team needs to work together with each other in a more cohesive and effective way. A culture of collaboration is necessary to provide the glue that binds the different functions and different divisions.
Hire the right talent
For digital transformation to thrive, you need to hire the right people who have a digital understanding and experience to implement such transformations. You most likely have some Eeyore’s in your company. You know the type, “Could be worse. Not sure how, but it could be.”
Hire people who are passionate about digital transformation. They light up a room when they talk about transformation within your organization. They have the vision and can impart that knowledge to the rest of the organization. These “agents of change” can provide the right focus, businesses processes, and training procedures to create success.
Define clear goals
Without clear goals, your organization may end up with people going in all different directions. There will be no clear plan. Like with any change initiative, the most important thing is to have your goals defined, and then actually delivering on those goals. And, you don’t have to do everything at once. Outline a plan and create a schedule of clear deliverables that must be met before you continue on to the next step in the plan.
Implement the right technology
Most organizations start a digital transformation by scoping out the required technology. If organizations focus solely on enabling technology, it may lead to failure. For example, a company undertook a complex ERP implementation to build new capabilities. Then, they started an IT modernization and moved its data to the cloud. This part of the transformation took three years and way too much capital and people resources.
Build a transformation plan that allows you to make small changes and provide wins within the company to showcase that you are creating change and growing the digital transformation initiative.
Start small and ramp up to scale
When starting out on a digital transformation project, organizations want to include everything – even the kitchen sink – in the initial roll-out plan. Companies may face a choice between accepting long delays in ramping up production versus leadership needing to push ahead to meet deadlines they have promised.
Start with a pilot program and then ramp up with a plan to include new ideas, potential solutions, and then deploy and scale up from the pilot version over several months.
Consider a no code enterprise mobile app
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