3Getting Started
Turning your company into a digital business—without harming your legacy business—is not simply a matter of unleashing the software engineers and their algorithms and waiting for them to flip the “on” switch. Placing your company on digital platforms and creating the single source of truth affects your company's structure, its culture, its priorities, its decision‐making speed, and its opportunities. In other words, it fundamentally influences vision and leadership.
Technology makes it possible to create digital businesses, but your people create true transformation. “Digital transformation” has become a buzzword. What we will explain is that the real performance benefits come when you and your team take ownership of the new systems and the new way of thinking about and managing your business.
Chief Executive magazine joined forces with Amazon Web Services in mid‐2021 to conduct a survey of how CEOs were navigating the process of building digital businesses, and it made a sobering finding about CEO attitudes: “Becoming a more digitally sophisticated enterprise is essential, and they are struggling to make it happen.” Nearly half of the leaders surveyed said that they are just “hanging in there” in the process of creating a digitally innovative business, or, as some admitted, they are “out of their depth.”
What issues were inhibiting the transformation? The problems all reflected on leadership: 38 percent said it was due to not having the right talent, 24 percent ...
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