This is the first part in a series on successful digital initiatives and transformation.
A few practitioners from Accenture offered their insight in the Harvard Business Review on the “Two Big Reasons Digital Transformations Fail” (October 2019). Their survey results from 1,350 global businesses in seventeen countries and thirteen industries revealed poor returns from Digital Business initiatives.
Two driving factors exist for digital initiative shortcomings:
1) Poor leadership alignment on digital, and
2) Inability to scale early digital pilots.
While the Accenture practitioners identified these two problems, they provided little insight on addressing them. On the other hand, our DigitalOps approach provides direction on how to tackle these key challenges and many more they don’t discuss. We do this with clear and actionable insight. We have broken the solutions to these challenges and others down into a few key component solutions, including the following:
- Defining and then aligning what digital transformation is,
- Technical debt reduction,
- Future state roadmaps and architecture,
- Innovation capability development, and
- Governance practices that extend beyond IT and encompass business initiatives (including innovation).
Prepare for Success by Resolving Digital Transformation Confusion
With the confusion that surrounds leadership alignment on digital goals (and digital goals in general), digital transformations unsurprisingly struggle, and in many cases, fail. How do you gain alignment on Digital when no one knows what Digital is?
The entire technology industry has marketed Digital in a way that is so hopelessly vague it loses all meaning. As a result, Digital often lacks boundaries that can be evaluated and explained, and people struggle to gain agreement on goals or set expectations.
Defining Digital
To cut through the hype and spin, we grounded the meaning of Digital to practical and understandable terms. Even if you don’t accept our definition, research, or insight, you should at least start with a clear definition with understandable boundaries. How else can you gain organizational and leadership alignment? The Harvard Business Review article “Digital Doesn’t Have to Be Disruptive” includes an insightful quote from an SVP (named Geneva), at a leading global company:
We have a dozen committees on digital transformation; we have digital transformation initiatives; we are going full steam on digital transformation…but no one can explain to me what it actually means.
At IITRun (a dba of R3Now), we have been exploring Digital for nearly two decades, and writing about Digital for about a decade (previously calling it ERP III and the Borderless Enterprise). Analyst firms such as Gartner have provided a broad definition that illustrates the problem we have observed with defining digital:
Digital business is the creation of new business designs by blurring the digital and physical worlds.
Any technology fits this definition, from something as mundane as typing data into a computer keyboard rather than directly on paper, to Augmented or Virtual Reality. When a definition means everything, it actually means nothing. In other words, the current digital definition encompasses all of technology and is meaningless.
Success in your digital journey begins with defining what Digital actually is. After all, if you don’t know what you are working toward, how will you ever know where you are going?
(We have Defined Digital Business in our next post.)
