The Human Side of Digital Business Transformation

Chapter 7Best Practices for Successful Transformation

For organizations around the world, digital transformation has become a matter of survival. A large number of digital transformation initiatives continue to fail, and organizations seeking to implement a successful organization-wide transformation should take the following best practices into consideration. The selection of best practices provided in this chapter are based on my personal experiences and collective insights that will help business leaders accelerate digital business transformation outcomes, and avoid typical pitfalls that arise in the process.

The People Side of Value Driven Digital Business Transformation

In a typical business environment, concerns over daily operational challenges take precedence over new or innovative solutions. This is further reinforced by top-level communication and organizational metrics. Traditional strategic planning approaches lead leadership teams to view disruption in a binary way—to assume that the world is either certain, and therefore open to precise predictions about the future, or uncertain, and therefore completely unpredictable. Many companies are still locked into strategy-development processes that churn along on annual cycles. Typically, the traditional strategic planning process identifies a list of key programs and projects; an estimate of each is then fed into a tedious budgeting process. These traditional strategic planning processes that align to annual business ...