The Roller Coaster Ride to Digital Transformation

For some organizations, digital transformation is a terrifying change. Dominic James outlines the steps for how to best implement that change.

dominic-james-2014By guest columnist Dominic James, The Change Effect

Everything is rushing past you at 200 kilometers per hour. You plunge suddenly and your stomach feels like it’s going to come up to your throat. You get thrown to the left, then thrown to the right. You are screaming, but the person next to you is enjoying the ride. The digital revolution is like a roller coaster. While people in some organizations feel terrified and out of control, others are enjoying the ride and can’t wait to get on board with the latest and greatest thrill.

Now, if you’re one of the terrified passengers and you look around to see a lot of people with huge grins on their faces, then you might ask yourself: “Is it just me that’s feeling like this?”

It turns out that it’s not a simple question to answer, not in the digital world anyway. This question, or a similar one, is something we’re asked frequently as consultants specializing in helping leaders embrace and implement change (often as a result of digital disruption). The reason it’s difficult to answer is because most of the research on digital maturity and transformation has a strong functional bias, e.g. IT-focused, marketing-focused, HR-focused, e-commerce focused.

So in recognition of the fact that organizational digital maturity and transformation is cross-functional, that is it impacts everyone, everywhere, from small to large companies, from marketing to procurement, from industrial machinery to toys, we have conducted a research study to achieve two objectives:

  1. Give organizations a simple way to evaluate their digital maturity holistically
  2. Gather benchmarks for digital maturity by industry, geography and company type

The study launched in August 2014 has had more than 250 responses, 60 percent from senior leaders. And we’ve already captured sufficient data to provide some benchmarks as a basis for comparison. For example, data to date highlights the vast disparity in how organizations are embracing digital transformation.

10oct2014-dominic-james-graphic-2

At the top end of the scale, the Polymaths and Pioneers (who make up 37 percent of our respondents) are leaders taking an active role in aggressively transforming all aspects of their organizations both internally, with their culture and ability to respond to market changes, and externally with their product and service offerings.

At the other end of the scale, are our Laggards and DIYs, organizations that make up 42 percent of our respondents, organizations with some awareness of the potential of digital transformation, but where the organization as a whole lacks direction.

We would expect these organizations to have a high risk of failing in the wake of increasing digital disruption.

So what do you do if you’re having a tough time riding that digital roller coaster? As a Level 1-3 organization who aspires to reach a higher level of maturity our advice is to initially focus your efforts on gaining critical organizational support.

While it’s not always easy to get proper support, there are many practical steps you can take that will work with a bit of effort.

Case for Change

One approach that works very well is to build a breakthrough case for change in the form of a short presentation or video (say five to 10 minutes). The exact message depends on your organization, but they’ll usually reference key facts (e.g. the current state of digital maturity in the organization), state the link between digital maturity and the business strategy (e.g. to be an $X billion company, our products need to be cutting-edge), and outline a clear path forward. Then the trick is to take every opportunity to present the case for change as context for any digital initiative. If your case for change is strong enough, eventually you’ll get an audience with the right people and be able to generate the support you need.

Another tactic that complements a case for change is to create wrappers that bring disparate initiatives under a big theme. The purpose of a wrapper is to cut through organizational barriers such as structure, hierarchy, geography, or P+L silos. With a bit of ingenuity and creativity, it’s not unusual to find that an organization already has many building blocks in place that can form the base for broader transformation. As a bonus, by bringing these initiatives together you will have started to build the alliances you need and secured some resources to implement a more meaningful transformation.

To find out your organization’s digital maturity level, complete the survey here and have access to a free download report with our initial benchmarks. To learn how to increase your organization’s digital maturity, join ClickZ’s Planning and Implementing Digital Transformation training courses in Hong Kong on 8 and 9 December. 

To find out more and watch a video introduction to the course, click here

Dominic James is an Asia-based business leader who has led major change efforts in several global MNCs. Currently, he owns a change leadership firm that works with multinationals, NGOs, and entrepreneurs who are embarking on major change efforts. 

Dominic is also heavily involved in driving revenue and profit growth as the Asia Pacific Principal for Pricing Solutions, the preeminent firm in global pricing research, training, and consulting. Dominic has previously worked for top-tier management consulting firms Schlumberger Business Consulting and Deloitte Consulting. Originally from the U.K., he holds an MSc in Management Science from Warwick University and a BSc in Mathematics, Modeling, and Computing from Kingston University.

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