Everyone has digital transformation on-the-brain, but its meaning has been lost during 2020 to mean ‘spend less – do more’. Digital transformation originally meant an end-to-end change in the way in which an organization is serving its customers. Digital transformation should be broad in scope. It requires a change in the vision held by the organization as well as a good deal of culture change.
Because of its breadth and the number of actions required to achieve it, digital transformation isn’t an easy process. According to Gartner, the transformation journey often costs twice as much as expected and takes twice as long. What aspects are companies overlooking that cause them to misjudge the required resources, and how can they be made more visible so that organizations can better anticipate the requirements?
Common Digital Transformation Mistakes
One major pitfall is the lack of a vision. In many cases, the initiative is only addressing a part of the problem. Companies may focus on just a single organizational process or a narrow slice of the customer experience or journey. When only a part of the customer journey is addressed, transformations tend to fail. You will need a roadmap that encompasses all of the proposed changes to help set priorities and direct resources to the efforts that will have the greatest impact.
Another pitfall is to focus solely on external processes. If the internal processes used to support external actions are not well designed, workers must engage in acts of heroics to make the customer experience go smoothly. These include manual intervention to compensate for not having the right metadata, for example. However, this approach is not sustainable.
Transformation depends on being able to capture and move data through critical enterprise processes. Organizations are trying to speed this up with automation. What many companies come to realize is they can’t automate a mess. Looking at enterprise processes from a fresh perspective can be a good catalyst to identify where efficiencies can be gained. Companies gain significant insights when they review processes and systems that have grown over time, sometimes in a sprawling way.
The technology stack in many organizations has become overly complex because of legacy systems that have evolved over time. It is hard to integrate new systems or pieces into a brittle environment. The resulting struggle of whether to start with a clean slate or update the present systems in a more coherent way follows. In either case, technology should not be viewed as the answer. The transformation needs to be based on human judgment at every level. Software tools will not solve process issues or compensate for flawed data.
A final challenge to overcome is data quality and governance. So often, the value of routine maintenance is overlooked in favor of innovation or easy. Maintenance is often sidelined because it’s difficult to directly connect data management to increased revenue. Improved metadata, for example, does not produce a visible spike in performance in the same way that a new ad campaign can. However, there is a digital chain of custody that leads from data to success: we can measure data quality, employ best practices that support a process outcome, and then connect that process to a business objective such as reducing the response time to provide a service to a customer. This in turn increases customer satisfaction. It is not too big a leap to infer a connection from customer satisfaction to improved customer retention and subsequent greater revenues.
Let InfoDNA Solutions help you assess the current state and bring automation to all corporate data and documents. Cannot transform anything if the data is untrusted or non-existent.
