Why Digital Transformation Fails
Digital Transformation is driving industries and businesses to change for the better. Organizations are embracing Technologies, utilizing data, and creating a better customer experience through their products and services tailor-made for their customers.
While there are ample of examples of enterprises who have benefitted by riding on the Digital Transformation wave, there is more to it than meets the eye. Forbes pointed out in 2016 that 7 out of 8 Digital Transformations were failing.
A number of enterprises conducted research and confirmed these facts. A lot of organizations were failing on the Digital Transformation front because they were only posing for the camera and doing nothing else.
They weren't ready to embrace Digital Transformation as a whole and were trying to tweak their strategies and infrastructure to make room for Digital Transformation, while the trend demanded a disruption and rebuild of everything.
Instead of starting at the grassroots level of their businesses, enterprises ended up taking short-cuts, building upon their obsolete and brittle infrastructure, pieces of Digital Transformation. This was the first reason why enterprises failed at Digitally transforming their businesses to account for the growing trend of technologies and advancements.
Some expensive mistakes that organizations make in following Digital Transformation wave are-
1. Not Investing in Things that Matter
Big Data and Analytics are literally shaping customer experiences and providing companies with a greater ROI. By leveraging the power in data, enterprises have realized what products/services their customers want, when they want it, and how they want it to be delivered. The organizations that fail to invest sufficiently in Big Data and Analytics get nothing in return for their pennies. Both qualitative and quantitative factors play a vital role in assuring Big Data projects' success. With an eye towards customer behavior, sentiment, and interests, organizations can develop effective marketing strategies and provide personalized recommendations to their customers. It is the failure to recognize this opportunity to its complete potential that makes Digital Transformation difficult for them.
2. The Hierarchy of an Organization
With an inclusive environment that involves the stakeholders and the workforce of a company, it becomes better to drive strategies that are customer-facing. A popular notion has it that the top managers in any organization who are the key people that decide on strategies and planning are only aware of 4 percent of the problems that their customers face. The middle management knows about 9 percent of these issues while supervisors have an idea about 75 percent of them. Is there anyone who knows them all? Yes! These are the front-line customer-facing employees that at last, implement and develop all Digital Transformation technologies for the business. When organizations fail to include these employees and their opinions in building their strategies, that is when they turn a blind eye to the actual issues being faced by their customers. This ignorance leads to failure in Digital Transformation.
3. Involvement of Stakeholders and Stability
In some organizations where there is a need for rapid disruption and advancement, leadership changes quickly, which leads to a disconnect between the top management and the front-line employees. This is because each leader has his own set of practices, approach, and perception of the same problem. And a continuous change in the management of an organization poses the challenge of continuing where the work was left. It becomes a necessity to see things in the same light, or the enterprise will remain on step one. It is important that the leadership in an organization sets the Digital Transformation priorities right and refrains from changing it or swaying away from it a lot.
If an organization can build better communication within its walls and plan out an effective Digital Transformation strategy before diving into it, success is sure to follow!