Surprisingly, achieving success in a digital strategy has nothing to do with technology. Read on as we explain what are the key drivers for a successful digital strategy.
As we explained on a previous blog post, digital transformation is all about the transformation part and not the technology itself. It comes with no surprise that getting a digital strategy to yield success has much more to do with how you transform the strategy into results than on the technology being pushed by the strategy.
So, what are the key points you need to focus on to get your digital strategy to be successful?
- Limit the number of targets: Besides the obvious fact that the more you want to change, the more likely you are to fail, you need to consider that all changes need to be communicated across the organization and you need the organization to be very clear about where you want to go and how you’ll get there. If you establish too many goals, it becomes almost impossible to assure that the organization and its people are aware about what is going to be done. On the other hand, if the goals are limited, it’s easy to align everybody behind them and everybody knows by heart what needs to be achieved. Rule of thumb: Narrow down you goals to no more than 3 and focus on them like there’s no tomorrow.
- Think for the future: Statements like “That’s how we’ve always done it” are poison in any transformation attempt, more so in a digital backed transformation strategy. It’s not because it has worked so far that the process doesn’t need to change. It’s precisely the opposite. Because you want the process to be better and sustainable in the future, you need to think ahead and discover how you’ll capture value and achieve sustainability by changing and becoming even more effective. And this has nothing to do with putting technology in an existing process, that’s precisely what will drive you into the wall. Technology serves its purpose by enabling change to become reality. The future vision is the cornerstone of the strategy, technology will fall into place as the enabler of the underlying change.
- Make the hard choices: It’s very easy to become thrilled with technology. This thrill of using the latest and coolest thing in the market is a sweet and compelling enough option. But it doesn’t mean that’s what you really need to achieve success. Sometimes, low end technology serves your purpose better or an incremental innovation, backed by organizational change management, mitigates an otherwise unsustainable risk. Don’t be lured into the easy calls, make the calls that help you get to where you want to go.
- Handle critical vulnerabilities: Given the highly complex landscape where a digital strategy needs to be implemented, you need to be very clear about the elements that are the most important for success and most likely to fail during implementation. Such elements are critical vulnerabilities and you must make a strong effort to identify them from the start. The only way to mitigate the risk induced by these vulnerabilities is to be particularly aware of them and putting your effort behind activities designed to cope with the potential side effects and problems created by these vulnerabilities. Don’t forget that these vulnerabilities can be triggered by external factors (like lack of stability in a specific innovative technology) as well as internal factors (like the difficulty to adjust existing competencies to a new process or activity).
- Be clear and objective: Making glorified, beautiful and vague statements about what you want to achieve just doesn’t help you. Thinks like “Achieve mobile enabled production control” or “Become highly responsive to change” are nice but don’t actually tell people where they need to go and how they measure if the goal was achieved or not. Instead use precise, quantified, objective statements that clearly define what you want to achieve and how you’ll get there.
Oddly enough, we’ve not even touched technology issues as a critical factor for digital strategy success. But that’s precisely what it takes, a clear and focus mindset in assuring the effectiveness of the strategy so technology can enable the transformation that will drive your business into sustainability.
At Processware, we’ve worked for many years in building and honing a methodology that serves precisely this purpose: Help our customers to effectively implement a digital transformation strategy, by focusing on the critical success factors, clear goals and efficient, technology-enabled, future-proof processes.
