82% of business and IT leaders believe that business agility is critical to delivering digital transformation, according to our recent global survey.
To quote Bill Gates, “Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react and reinvent”. The key point here is that transformation is an ongoing process. With disruptors changing industries faster than ever before – it’s those that are most agile who will survive and thrive.
That presents an important question: how exactly can you create this culture of agility and innovation?
It won’t be easy of course, but based on our primary research of over 1,000 people and project experience, here are a few practical steps to help align your organization to a more agile mind-set.
When you’ve been tasked with making a radical change, it can be a major sticking point to figure out exactly where and how to begin. It sounds obviousy. But if you have an itch to start straight away on disparate pilot programs, stop and ask yourself, will you be risking a lack of control and scalability? Your other option is to meticulously craft the perfect transformation plan, but by then months or years could have passed with no tangible results to show for it.
Making that plan tangible for the rest of your business is the key. Your plan should include a series of incremental quick wins that are directly related to the objectives of specific departments and teams. For large organizations this can be a simple case of picking from a list of stated corporate goals. Gor the rest, its a case of looking at where your industry is going vs how your business operates today and finding the biggest gaps.
Identifying these key areas and teams will help to understand and prioritize. This ensures that things move along swiftly and that there will be opportunities for departments to share successes with the board.
The first reaction to change is usually some form of resistance. You will need to convince them all that digital transformation is crucial to survival of the business. But more importantly, they all have a significant role to play in making it happen. This is about inspiring individuals within your business to step up and take responsibility for transforming their specific area of the business.
It’s imperative that this comes from the top; if senior management wholeheartedly support the change, it will filter down to all levels of the business. But providing an element of ownership to different departments and making them feel part of wider success will be critical to getting them fully involved.
It’s one thing for you to successfully execute a trial transformation initiative in one small team. It’s quite another to roll that change out across the whole organization. It needs to be effective in all core systems and critical processes, and positively impact the customer experience.
What more and more businesses are realizing is that repeating this process requires a technology based on a platform. You need one that has the ability to connect people, processes, devices and data to bring agility into how the business operates. But technology alone can’t solve digital transformation, far from it, the responsibility lies with you to decide how to use the new platform to return the customer to the heart of the organization and its operations.
Face these challenges head-on and you’ll be three steps further along your digital transformation journey and one step closer to delighting your customers.
Want to learn more? Find out how the pressures faced by business leaders and IT leaders differ, and how you can work together more effectively to accelerate your digital transformation timeline. Download the ‘How to Create a Timeline for Digital Transformation’ eBook.
