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Why Digital Transformations Fail?
The last year and half has been a time of resilience and change on many fronts. For many companies, 2020 accelerated their digital transformation journeys whether they were ready for it or not. Today, some are flourishing while others are struggling with digitization projects. In light of that, lets take a closer look at some of the reasons why digital transformations fail…
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is the term used to define the integration of digital technology solutions into your business. Digital transformation is about replacing slow, inefficient business processes with new tech ideas that change how you operate and deliver products or services to customers. The goal is that through a digital transformation effort technology solutions, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and/or Machine Learning, can transform a business to improved service and productivity levels, better decision making, and greater financial performance.
How Digital Transformations Fail?
Like any large, company-wide undertaking digital transformations require long-term vision and planning, disciplined execution, and buy-in from the team. The digital transformation process is the mother of all change management efforts a business faces…it’s no wonder that some organizations are struggling with it.
5 Reasons Why Digital Transformations Fail:
- No Strategic Planning – A Strategic Plan acts as an organizing and communication tool for corporate initiatives. It documents the importance of a handful of efforts and priorities in the business. If a digital transformation effort is missing from the strategic plan (or there’s no strategic plan), digital transformations can easily stumble due to a lack of communication and prioritizing.
- Leadership Team Misalignment – When members of a leadership team have competing business priorities, but overlapping areas of influence, digital transformations initiatives can encounter speedbumps or roadblocks.
- Middle Led Transformation – When a wide-reaching digital effort is being championed by the middle of an organization and lacks executive support, challenges will inevitably rise and budgets may dry up if the executive team does not support and influence the effort too.
- Lack of Project Planning – Digital transformations are not a ‘one and done’ project, it involves many objectives, milestones, and extensive communication efforts. Large scope projects typically integrate a project charter, steering committee, a dedicated project manager and senior team sponsor. Without defined scope, tasks, accountabilities and timelines, projects can get drawn out or stuck.
- Skills Gap on the Team – Keeping up with technology is no small feat and if its not part of your an everyday effort, its easy to fall behind. When an internal teams stretches to learn new technology ideas and products alongside massive project undertakings, slowdowns are common consequence.
How to Succeed at Digital Transformation?
In its simplest form, a great path to organizational project success is solid planning, communication, and team alignment. That said, digital journeys are complicated as they’re also a significant change effort. Everyone has a natural resistance to change that must be taken into consideration too.
Consider Working with a Certified Microsoft Consulting Partner
A digital transformation journey is an undertaking that often requires extra skillsets to bridge the gap from the past to the future during the project. Our team at Convverge are certified Microsoft experts that know how to support with digital transformation consulting services. Our consultants can advise on digital strategy as well as configuring and applying technology for business process automations, business analytics and data modernization, as well as cloud infrastructure to ensure you’re setup with modern workplace solutions. If our Microsoft solutions understanding and consulting services can be of help, please contact us.
