Maximizing your investments in digital transformation is entirely achievable
Digital disruption is upon all industries, all over the world today. Now, more than ever, businesses are under pressure to perform, survive, and thrive. A crucial part of this upheaval involves digital transformation, to ensure that the business does not fall behind the competition, but instead stays ahead of the curve.
Yet, it is no secret that over 80% of all digital transformations fail. For the organizations that fail, this means wasted time, money, and effort in a development that is so essential to the success of their business.
As a CEO, your mandate is to maximize investments made in digital transformation efforts and come out smelling like roses in the eyes of your investors and other stakeholders. So how do you go about achieving this?
Learn from others’ mistakes
The first thing to do is to learn what not to do. Let’s take the classic story of Ford Motor Company’s first stab at digital transformation, which royally tanked. In 2014, the American car company created a new segment called Ford Smart Mobility.
The idea was to build digitally-enabled cars with enhanced mobility features. Things started going downhill when the new segment wasn’t integrated with the rest of the company. The new segment was headquartered far away from Ford and treated as a separate entity with no relation to other business units.
Ford continued dumping huge investments into the new venture, ending up with quality issues in other areas of the company, which eventually caused its stock price to tank, and the CEO's resignation a few years later.
The moral of this story is that digital transformation efforts need to be integrated with the rest of your organization. Not only do you need other business units to co-exist with any new unit, but you also need the buy-in of the whole organization for the digital transformation to succeed. This includes everyone from frontline staff, to mid-level managers, C-suites, and yes, even the board of directors and investors.
Recognize your pain points
Too many CEOs focus on the technology aspect of digital transformation, dumping money into expensive software and solutions, often believing that this will magically transform their organization into a digitally up-to-date business.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. What does work to become a data-driven business en route to successful digital transformation? And this entails a commitment to gathering data from all aspects of the business. And to be data-driven, you need to enable employees at every level to utilize the right data in a timely manner. The end goal of this is to encourage conclusive decision-making that will produce the business outcomes you want to give you that edge over your competitors.
The benefits of becoming a data-driven organization clearly outweigh the costs. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, a data-driven organization is 23 times more likely to acquire customers, 9 times more likely to retain these customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable as a result.
At The Center for Applied Data Science (CADS), we recognize the pain points you experience as a CEO. The first paint point organizations usually experience is getting management on board with the data-driven strategy.
There is often some difficulty aligning the top team and getting the buy-in from management on the organization’s digital and data vision and ambition. In this situation, there is no clarity of direction from the top and management usually establishes the wrong culture.
Secondly, as a CEO, you may have difficulty prioritizing strategic investments that will provide the best yields, resulting in missed opportunities and quick wins, wasted investments, and your organization falling behind the competition.
Solving the problem
Now that you know what could go awry in investing in your organization’s digital transformation, how do you get to where you want to go? The answer lies in knowing where your organization is currently at in its data-driven journey.
At CADS, we have created the Data-Driven Organization™ Model to help CEOs like yourself assess where your organization is at and set the direction for your organization’s digital transformation accordingly so that at the end of the day, you can steer your organization to where you want it to be.
The DDO™ Model will have you asking the right questions towards developing the right strategy for your organization’s data-driven journey. Some of the key questions are as below:
But don’t just take our word for it: our whitepaper “Talents, not technology will make or break your digital transformation”, presents real-life examples of three very different organizations: a bank, a utility company, and an oil and gas major, all digitally transformed themselves by investing strategically and doing all the right things to become data-driven organizations.
Click on the link below to download the whitepaper or book a demo today.
