Gartner Highlights Business Transformation Mistakes -- and How to Avoid Them
Digital technology has unleashed many trends that will fundamentally transform enterprises, industries and even society as a whole. New research by Gartner Inc. reveals that an enterprise digital transformation program demands that business and top leaders harness the efforts of all, continually aligning them with the journey’s objective and driving them toward that objective.
“Eighty-two percent of CEOs responding to our annual CEO Survey said they have a digital transformation program underway to make their companies more digital,” said Mark Raskino, Distinguished VP Analyst, at Gartner. The survey also showed a lack of business model change penetration and other indicators, which causes us to think that many of these digital transformation initiatives may not be sufficiently deep corporate transformations.”
Digital transformation success needs to operate at three levels — corporate governance, management and execution — but the analysts also found companies make mistakes at all three levels that will frustrate transformation. Knowing where those mistakes may happen can help enterprises avoid falling into these traps.
Misread the true scope of digital change. For example, failing to examine how digital forces will change an industry or having an insufficient corporate mission to see and seize product and business model innovation.
Too much inward thinking. Too often organizations focus on themselves and what they want to do rather than analyzing customer needs, the opportunities those present and a full competitive market view for examples and learnings.
“It’s not my job.” Digital transformation must be part of the mission of the organization and in the core of its leaders. If it is not, incremental progress will be made but transformational progress will elude the company.
Digital is undefined and goals are vague. Organizations must do the upfront hard work to define their goals, set specific targets and metrics, and then measure those to ensure the transformation project is on track.
Incrementalism. When digital is undefined, initiatives may only be focused on improving today and not putting the funding, systems and specific plans in place to do the real transformation. Management should ask: Is it really transformational? Digital business works at the level of revenue and business model change and product reinvention. Look for the structural investment. If it is not there, your very unlikely going to transform.
Fixed minds. A fixed mindset is one of constrained capabilities. Organizations must learn how to develop a growth mindset to build an innovative culture that will thrive in the era of digital business. A growth mindset embraces the idea that new capabilities can be developed through smart learning, good strategies and input from others.
Over-planning. Organizations should institutionalize lean startup thinking at every level. Lean startup thinking favors experimentation over planning. This process aims to quickly and iteratively build an innovation to become a “minimum viable product” that can be released to the customer, and then through feedback it continues to evolve the innovation.
Technology-centric. Organizations should watch out for buying into the hype of the “next big thing.” Organizations should instead focus on reinventing their industry with a collection of technological tools. Transformation is never just doing the next big thing. “
Culture blindness. Culture is one of the biggest barriers to scaling digital transformation. Organizations should focus on resetting purpose and beliefs to drive culture change. Determine the purpose of the company, what it yields for the world and what the beliefs are of the people coming to work each day. Use culture hacks, some of which can be implemented in less than 48 hours, to move culture from a barrier to an accelerator.
For more information visit https://www.gartner.com/).
