It seemed just a short time ago every company in the known universe was bound and determined to create unified digital experiences across the time space continuum. The consultants talked, and they listened. The art of the possible was going to future proof customer experience on the big data agile cloud, or something like that. And though a global pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital tools, it has done little to address the 3 most significant hurdles for digital transformation.
The sheer volume of content that needs to be updated, converted, or migrated in many organizations is staggering and like dating in your mid-thirties, ain’t nobody out there without some baggage. Better, smarter, faster tools are only valuable going forward. In many instances this content is already spread across many different systems and has survived migration more than thrived because of it. Organization and standardization feels like the summit of an unfathomable climb, making any attempt at progress feel overwhelming for those who are tasked with these kinds of initiatives. This leads to the second reason digital transformation is failing – Time to Value.
Let’s be honest, the reality of the world around us is things change, sometimes rapidly. Companies don’t need digital solutions years from now, they need them today. When digital projects are slow to roll out, confidence and momentum wane. Follow through then becomes an issue as stakeholders move on to other priorities, or worse, other jobs. This is complicated by the fact that so many digital transformation initiatives are expensive. We’re not talking about blowing the grocery budget at Whole Foods expensive. We’re talking about multi-year, multi-million dollar endeavors that produce very little in terms of tangible results. Being oversold technology solutions is a big part of the problem, and we could write an entire book on that subject. However, the truth is there are just as many barriers internally for many companies, which leads us to our next reason digital transformation is failing GWC.
Gino Wickman, founder of the Entrepreneurial Operating System, will tell you that every employee needs to get it, want it, and have the capacity to do it. In our experience many organizations struggle with 2 out of 3 of these critical factors for success. Creating a sense of accountability and transparency around digital transformation can be challenging. Not every employee understands why the initiative is important or what the business is trying to achieve – they don’t get it.
In many organizations we have worked with, digital transformation is a task on top of an already large workload. Employees who are tasked with these digital initiatives also have competing priorities, many of which are more closely tied to their job description and performance reviews – they don’t have capacity.
What we do find is that most employees and stakeholders don’t have an issue with wanting it. Who wouldn’t want to cash in on all the promises of digital transformation? Being oversold on a technology is a direct result of wanting it, and some would say wanting it too much. If organizations work to make sure their teams get it and have capacity as much as they want it, digital transformation can be much less turbulent.
Let’s keep it real, digital transformation is a big undertaking and you already have a lot to deal with. We can’t solve all of your digital problems, but we can automate the conversion of your forms from any format into embeddable and configurable web forms that work on anything.