Success in digital transformation requires bringing together tremendous effort in the following areas - technology, data, process, organizational change capability.
The digital transformation which is very difficult and requires creating and communicating a compelling vision, to crafting a plan and adjusting it on the fly, is all about people.
The most important step for any digital transformation initiative in any organization is to assemble the right team of technology, data, and process team who can work together under a strong leader. We will discuss each aspect in detail.
Technology:
Emerging technologies like IoT, blockchain, artificial intelligence have tremendous potential. Understanding how a particular technology works, adapting to the business needs and integrating it with the existing systems is a daunting task. Many companies have legacy technologies that are difficult to change which further complicates the adoption of new technologies. hence you need people who have the talent, the technological depth and understanding and ability to work hand in hand with business. The technical team must provide and demonstrate business value with every technological innovation. they should be good communicators, must have the strategic sense to make technological choices that balance innovation and technological mastery.
Data:
The quality of data that is gathered and used is very basic and require better quality and analytics. It is also necessary to understand new types of unstructured data, massive external data, leveraging proprietary data and integrating everything at the same time getting rid of unwanted data. Most companies know that data is important and the present quality of data id bad and they need to put proper roles and responsibilities in place.
Like technology the team the people manning data must be able to convince the front line people to take on new roles as dictated by data as either customers or creators. They should also help the frontline people to improve work process and tasks such that they create quality data.
Process:
Digital transformation requires an end to end mindset, a rethinking of ays to meet customer needs, seamless connectivity among work units and managing silos. Process management across silos focussed on customers is difficult to reconcile in a traditional hierarchy. Without this, the whole exercise is reduced to a series of incremental changes important but not transformative.
To build talent in this domain align silo in the direction of the customer to improve existing processes and design new ones and a sense to know when an incremental improvement is sufficient and when a radical change is necessary.
Organizational change capability:
This includes leadership, teamwork, courage, emotional intelligence among other elements. Technology is the main engine of transformation, data is the fuel, the process is the guidance system and organizational change capability is the landing gear. They must all function well together. Any domain can take the lead n case of issues but all of them should work well together.
There is no sense in automating a process that doesn't work and so in many cases, the improvement must come first. In some cases introducing technology that depends on data may fail due to bad data and hence work on data must start first. Start with your end goals and then develop a sequence best suited to achieve them.
Digital transformation must focus on the great need within the company. These priorities ill also decide n the talent required. It is important that the talent possesses the four types of exercise and has had previous successes at creating and executing technology-driven transformation.
HBR May 2020
Digital Transformation Comes Down to Talent in 4 Key Areas
by Thomas H. Davenport and Thomas C. Redman
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