It’s easy to begin the digital transformation of your organization and harder to achieve its success of implementation because nearly 7-8 of the companies that begin their journey in digital transformation fails.
To beat the odds of digital transformation failure, we’ll have to understand the reasons for enabling the growth of the organization.
Digital Transformation Statistics
Organizations that undergo digitization by incorporating new processes, tools and philosophies refer to Digital Transformation giving them a greater competitive edge in a software-driven marketplace.
Many organizations face a strong pressure to begin their journey on digital transformation. Such pressure originates not just from competitors, who will push your business out if you fail to digitize. It may also arise from the internal executives that insist on Digital Transformation to improve efficiency. 47% of the CEO insists their boards achieve Digital Transformation successfully and more than half report increase in profits.
Even though some organization achieves digital transformation with a limited success, more than half fail to meet any expectation.
Digital Transformation Challenges
Digital Transformation failure begins at the initial stage of organizations as they face inflexible challenges. Some organizations struggle with their existing legacy technologies which are hard to replace and some are unable or unwilling to assign the budget to replace old technologies. Some also have faced hardship to find the right qualified leadership in the executive and board level to guide such initiatives and some can't find the right digital and IT staff with the right combination of industry knowledge.
Once the challenges are overcome, and as you embark on the digital transformation, there is still a high chance of digital transformation failures.
Digital Transformation Failures are the result of the following factors:
Focusing on the Technology instead of People and Process:
The combination of all three pillars of DevOps are people, process and technology. Most of the organization focus only on technology when it comes to digitizing and completely ignore the latter two resulting in digital transformation failure.
This happens because it is difficult to fill the gaps in people and process than in technology. Using value stream mapping that involves tracing a product from the beginning to finish can overcome this gap. This helps in determining the bottlenecks and eliminating them.
Even though the gaps are filled in all three pillars of DevOps, an organization can still get put down in looking at isolated issues, before looking at the overall picture and making sure the biggest gaps are filled first.
Lack of Buy-In:
We all know that digitizing adds efficiency and agility to the organization, but recognizing the value of technology is not the same as convincing the board of executives in your organization as the time and money required to adopt will overhaul the exiting process. This leads to a lack of buy-in which will, in turn, prevents the organization from adopting new technology in the first place.
To overcome the buy-in challenge is to ensure that you evaluate and communicate the value of new technology or process in a reckoner. For Example: Look at the products in your organization that can be migrated to the cloud and gather the data on cost savings and performance increase to make a solid report.
Strategies:
Even though the decision to embrace digital transformation is in your favor, avoiding digital transformation failure depends on how well everyone in the organization participates in it. It just can’t be kicked off due to managerial team’s decision without getting in touch with the reality of the actual team, because you need the backing of those who will implement the transformation.
Undergoing Digital Transformation involves complex problems, and they still need to keep the lights green. Team’s trust is necessary for the success of digital transformation which should be done with slow changes.
Lack of Focus on Business Goals
The technologies and process that are right for one organization might be inadequate for another organization. Digital transformation fails if this is not identified in the initial stage and you might end up with excess or fall short on the resources. Technologies like Cloud and Containers service can’t be just implemented without considering the strategy of how it should be aligned with the goals your business, using metrics to assess and determine can improve the value your business.
Failure to Understand DevOps
DevOps is not just about assisting developers and IT Ops, it is much more complicated than it. DevOps are required to collaborate with different groups such as developers, IT Ops, Data scientists, security, etc. for faster and better software delivery. They also need to quickly catch up and embrace new tools that can help the organization achieve continuous delivery.
Lack of understanding the complexity and true nature of DevOps might lead to the failure of digital transformation. DevOps are required to develop and implement complex transformation strategies, just like the rest of the digital transformation process are.
Thinking Digital Transformation has been Achieved
One of the main reasons why many organizations fail to achieve their goals is by thinking that digital transformation is already achieved before it does which leads to digital transformation failures. Truth be told, technology is changing every day and by that digital transformation is an ongoing journey where one has to keep up with the changes.
The different tools such as camera, calculator, music player, and telephone are all replaced by one device. It is the same with any digital technology where one has to keep up with the adaption as the new technology will replace the current technologies.