Don't think Digital Transformation, think People Transformation.
Don't think Digital Transformation, think People Transformation.
Here’s why.
Digital transformation is about customers and employees. It's critical to plan for the human factor, and not see a digital transformation exercise as being a tech solution alone. Any solution that is implemented is going to change the way customers do business with you, and change the way roles of employees are defined. Expecting to implement solutions that do not change anything in actual interaction or workflow is a fallacy. How you effectively plan for this People Transformation is going to make a difference in its acceptance and success.
"Digital transformation is 20% technology infrastructure, 30% data and 50% skill" - PWC Middle East CEO Survey.
There are many factors that go into determining the success of a digital transformation exercise. These are my top 3 from a people standpoint.
1. The starting point is the customer journey. A well thought out customer journey will clearly demonstrate which areas need transformation and why. Without that, it will be a technology and process play. The purpose of digital transformation is to change how a company provides value to its customers. I don't believe that it can be used interchangeably with modernizing your legacy architecture or moving from on-premise to the cloud. Definitely, that's included in the exercise, but the starting point is People i.e. Customers. Insights into what customers want and how those wants translate into loyalty will determine the changes needed. After crafting this customer journey, you will see how to align teams, and how to derive the best value from a revamped workflow. Opting for a solution that sounds great in theory but does not truly address what the customer needs from your business is pointless.
2. This will determine how the organization should be structured in terms of employees and skills. For example, a typical restaurant with a dine-in model being up-ended by shifting customer needs and the rise of cloud kitchens needs to re-evaluate everything: from the fixed kitchen to supply chain to leasing property to technology investment to skill requirements. The starting point cannot be: let's launch a food delivery app because these are popular, and everything else is BAU. That is not digital transformation, it's tactics.
In transforming business, cross-functional teams and role changes need to be expected.Let's face it, people have tremendous inertia in changing how they do their daily job. But it will be required. If your digital transformation efforts reduce manual input, automate many parts of the business requirements and effectively free up time to do more strategic thinking, people need to be skilled for that. Data is at the heart of decision making, which means that apart from your team of data scientists, people across key levels of the company need to be comfortable with data, and understanding that analytics begins by asking the right questions.
3. Designing your digital transformation solution needs all stakeholders to participate and set aside time from their daily jobs. This cannot be left to one department. If key stakeholders do not dedicate time for this, your solution will be set up for failure. Digital transformation design is not fixed. There are many changes that happen along the way. Existing tech limitations, or integrations required with external tools that do not structure data pulls the way you expect, or rethinking team roles while designing the solution - daily decisions are required. You must expect changes in the design along the way and a buy-in from stakeholders through the design will ensure proper adoption by teams later. Training is not adoption. It is about changing mindsets.
Some more of my thoughts on the impact of Digital Transformation on businesses are here - this was my keynote for Middlesex University Dubai's International Conference on Technology, Innovation and Sustainability in Business Management.