Nearly every business I now speak to is going through some
form of digital change. From smaller organisations assessing the capabilities
and skills of their online marketing teams & agencies, through to major multi-nationals
looking to transform their IT systems, business processes and customer
engagement models around electronic services... the mantra is clear “change or
be changed in this new digital world” and I bet yours is very similar.
But transforming your company into a digital leader isn't
easy and “becoming the next Amazon” is neither realistic nor practical for most
organisations.
To give some ideas of the challenges faced, from my
experience here are some areas where organisations fail to get a grip on their
digital change:
Are you still creating lengthy waterfall project plans more suited to industrial age delivery expectations? The age of agile development and iterative delivery has not only been around for decades now, it has evolved into different flavours and techniques. However, just diving into a fully-blown scrum delivery method without fully understanding the implications this will have on the wider business (and setting these up correctly) is also a recipe for failure.
Just giving people new digital job titles doesn't cut it. There’s a talent war
out in the wider marketplace right now, where businesses are struggling to hire
and keep the right people with the necessary online skills to take big steps
forward in technology, marketing and other commercial areas. Assess what makes your company different and
how you could attract and retain the right talent to realise your digital
ambitions.
Ask yourself who in your company is actually responsible for the ownership and stewardship
of your digital strategy? Where are the priorities, road-map and alignment of
this digital strategy to the rest of the business set? If this role is not
represented at your boardroom table, then you’re probably not taking it
seriously enough.
It’s one thing to make bold claims about where your company will be in the
future, it’s another entirely to assume it will get there without a technical vision
of what the end solution looks like. I don’t think I have ever been on a
successful change programme that failed to have the solution architecture for
the main features or components defined in advance.
Sure, every company likes to say it gets everything “right first time” but in
reality this never happens… there is always room for improvement and things
always go wrong. Or in other words “fail forward” by: accepting it, getting on
with it, learning from it and move forwards quickly. One client I worked for in
the past had a company policy of actually rewarding when a member of staff
accepted they had made a failure (and quickly wrote up what went wrong and what
they would do better next time).
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