Digital transformation remains a top priority for business leaders.

Whether we aspire to digitally enabled products, integrated global processes, enhanced employee experiences, greater customer and supplier engagement, better data driven decision making or AI-enabled operating improvements, “transformation” is the name of the game.

Every experienced leader will tell you that the digital transformation journey is a long one.

This is because, irrespective of the digitization technology or technique, we are ultimately intersecting with human behavior, be it customer, supplier, business partner or employee .  . .

The last year has been a mixed blessing.  All the negatives we hear daily, plus the benefit of the dramatic shifts in organisational agility we have seen with our own eyes.

I read an article today that suggests the 3 biggest digital transformation challenges ahead AND, helpfully, how we might address them. This echoes some of our own experiences and resonates my personal belief that the technologies themselves should not be the primary area of management concern. 

The article suggests these 3 challenges;

1. COVID-19 has spurred new customer needs and expectations
   • ​We have demonstrated our ability to adapt to remote, separated work at scale and speed, to rapidly enable contact-less interfaces and Interactions, to appreciate the value (and risk) of integrated end-to-end processes and to embrace the need for accelerated digitization. Our customers and consumers now expect this.
2. The gap between expertise and expectation is increasing
   • ​Whilst widely reported specialist skills shortages exist, we need to balance expectations of technology capabilities with the psychology of systemic process and human change. End to end global process understanding is now key. We need to apply the “Pareto Principle” of delivering 80% of the value in less than 20% of the timescale and resources of previous models, whilst sustaining strategy alignment. ​
3. Outdated organization structures and leadership styles inhibit progress 
   • Despite a decade or more embracing “Agile”, we need, more than ever,  to encourage self-organizing, diverse and multidisciplinary teams with empathy and adaptability, realistic goals as well as appropriate technology We are entering an era where, paradoxically, the human factors are coming to the fore.

You can read this 4 minute article here – the topic resonated with me . . .

Thanks for reading