By: Insticc Digital™
Did you know, according to McKinsey 70% of all digital transformations fail to reach their goals? While the advantages of digital transformation (DX) are obvious, attaining them is a hugely challenging task, and should not be underestimated.
Without adopting the correct approach, finding the right combination of skills, and meticulous preparation and planning, enterprises may find themselves among the percentile who have invested significantly in high-profile DX initiatives, but failed to achieve the desired outcomes or the projected ROI. Being effective at DX is not exactly a leisurely stroll in the park.
Post-Covid19, DX has become the buzzword around DevOps boardrooms, ad nauseum we’d say. While an increasing number of businesses are adapting their offerings, processes and strategies to leverage the benefits of digital tech, even the most high-profile initiatives have failed – spectacularly at that, despite deep investment.
Before your DX project becomes a statistic, let’s take you through what we believe are the main reasons DX initiatives fail in epic proportions.
At Insticc Digital™ we aim to deliver DX which is not only sustainable and delivers long-term strategic benefits, but are effective in attaining short-term operational efficiencies.
Lack of adequate skills, on-demand
The correct skills, trained and committed personnel required for a successful digital transformation are hard to find. To transform digitally is an-end-to-end endeavour – transitioning operations to cloud for an enhanced, continuous experience for clients, while simultaneously empowering and enabling your team to collaboratively work from anywhere in the world, across timelines and technologies.
It takes a concerted effort, and in many cases an insurgence of change management to migrate workflows to cloud infrastructure, coupled with sourcing hard technical cloud skills being in uber high demand globally. Failing to gain access to the correct talent pools from which to hire the right talent to drive DX is major reason why digital transformation fails time and again.
Enterprises routinely fail to invest in talent with a high enough level of digital understanding and proven experience in successfully implementing transformations. We can safely say, any exec of the opinion that they can transform their operations and business in a significant way with all the same people, skills and an outdated mindset to on-demand talent, are to put it lightly, just fooling themselves.
Limited scope current technologies
Even if an enterprise is effective in launching its DX programmes, the tech they deploy to do so, more often than not are ill equipped to scale and grow in proportion with the organisation. Furthermore, as many as 78% of organisations struggle to properly expand their DX programmes and achieve the desired return on their digital investment. We’ll just let that sink in for a minute!
Given that many corporates are restricted in scope, their DX routinely fades out. Enterprises should seek holistic, organisational-wide solutions which will be foundational to a long-term, sustainable strategy.
The wrong mindset
Not having management’s head in the right gear is often the first reason we’ve seen digital transformation initiatives in the market not only grossly underperform, but fail outright.
Let’s face it, the majority of human beings tend to be inherently opposed to change. The executive team’s mindset can play a pivotal role in assisting in ushering in the mindset required to not only embrace change required for successful transformations, but for employees to actually welcome and thrive on innovative change.
Lack of unifying strategy
The addition of new tech is just one of the many facets of DX. Yes tech plays a pivotal role for the overall DX success, it absolutely has to be directed by a long-term strategy that guides the business, its investments, its people and their activities.
According to a McKinsey report, businesses embracing the below characteristics are a staggering 3x more likely to deploy successful DX:
- Defined project scope and outlining responsible parties
- A vision that links digital tech to overall business goals and objectives
- Clear outcomes and goals alongside a timeline and roadmap
Isolated tech ecosystems
If we think of DX strategy as the map that steers enterprise to its desired destination of digital transformation, technology serves as the vehicle that gets them there.
However, as businesses combine ecosystems and applications, their technology stack becomes entangled, resulting in a disconnected user experiences and squandered resources.
- According to Forrester, the number one technical challenge facing digital experience leaders is inadequate integration with back-end systems
- With over59% of survey respondents cite outdated and legacy infrastructure and tools as a barrier to successful transformation
- 80% of legacy technologiesactually prevent digital transformation!
To disentangle this proverbial ball of string, organisations should invest in a connective tech foundation such as a digital experience platform (DXP) to interweave legacy systems, existential databases, and third-party systems into a unified platform. The true power of a DXP is its ability to merge with an array of legacy and complimentary tech to provide a seamless, continual, and optimised agile experience.
Lack of Clear UX Goals
The failure ratio is significantly larger when there are layer upon layer of legacy applications to migrate to cloud platforms, with some enterprises negating to outline detailed goals in terms of their specific end-user experience. There is a lack of benchmarked historic end-user experience for prior, during and post migrations. A lack of clear UX goals to navigate towards is another sure fire way to fail epically with a DX project.
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