More and more businesses are seeking to digitally transform their organizations to meet the ever increasing demands and expectations of the modern, technically sophisticated customer. But few are prepared for the internal disruption this causes throughout the entire enterprise, which is why culture change and change management is so important.
For digital transformation to be successful, businesses need to adopt agile methodologies, processes and working practices. Becoming an agile business requires a cultural change. Similarly, as digital transformation is largely driven by the changing demands and expectations of customers, customer-centric strategies are a must and successfully developing and implementing these new approaches requires a more integrated and fluid organization.
Laying the Foundations of Digital Transformation
Businesses whose digital transformation projects fail are usually guilty of failing to lay solid foundations:
Agile
Customer-Centric
Omni-Channel Experience
Laying these foundation stones requires huge culture change within the organization and managing this process is challenging. Unfortunately, if your organization wants to be successful, it is unavoidable.
Culture Change
Due to the ever changing and ever evolving nature of the modern world, businesses need to cultivate a culture of perpetual revolution.
The days of businesses setting a strategy for the next 5 years, then waiting for the business execute that strategy, are long gone. Setting a 5 year strategy is still important, but the need to be able to rapidly pivot that strategy at will is fundamentally important to the long-term strategic success of the enterprise. Most businesses, especially big and established companies, are difficult to turn and this is why aggressive new market entrants are able to sweep in and digitally disrupt industries, markets and supply chains. Established companies are too slow to respond and by the time they have mounted a meaningful response, the new entrant has established a strong position in the market and is almost impossible to remove. Companies need to be able to pivot quickly to respond to new market entrants and changes in the competitive landscape.
Similarly, as new technologies emerge, customers and other major stakeholder group's demands and expectations change. The innovation roadmap you are following today could be redundant in weeks or months. Agility enables quick pivoting of development roadmaps, rapid transformation of customer-centric strategies and the re-engineering of omni-channel customer experiences.
All these cases cause enterprise wide disruption and with the frequency of these disruptions rising, a culture of change and constant revolution is a must.
For more information about digital transformation, read my whitepaper:
Digital Transformation: A Guide for Business Leaders.
By Robin Cronan
Labels: Change Management, Culture Change, Digital, Digital Transformation
