True North

Digital transformation is not easy. Many change programmes fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of corporate leadership.

Every transformation initiative is about people, and people with the right talent. Success needs team members who are experts in enterprise architecture, product, engineering, process, data and customer engagement, led by an experienced organisational change leader.

These domains are all inter-related.  It’s tempting to start a new initiative with technology, but when you consider the embeddedness of systems within business processes and the technical debt that you’re almost certainly saddled with, both have origins in a lack of enterprise architecture.

The data that flows through those systems is generally of worse quality than expected, and rarely suitable for the analytic work that will release the value in this overlooked corporate asset.

Building a customer-centric organisation shifts focus onto the internal value-chain and showcases the need to operate across silos, with an end-to-end process mindset.

There is no sense in automating a broken process, so process improvement or refactoring the system must come first.

Understanding the customer and the gap between their perceived and experienced value is vital.

Organisations need to understand who their customers are, and then fully and effectively engage with them. If they can’t do that, then how do they know what value to deliver?

Execs will find it difficult to see the full potential of a digital transformation programme, not least because most of them have functional accountability. So, you'll need to appoint the right leader, someone who can put together the right team of people and focus them on the transformational activities that will make a difference.