Is the term digital transformation overused? It’s thrown around a lot, both as a promise of what is to come, and as a reason behind many personal and business decisions. Is there a clear definition though, or are companies and individuals bending the concept to fit their business needs, a flashy term to catch client attention?
The progress of technology developing and becoming integrated into our lives is an exciting thing, but should we be pressuring ourselves to remain on the forefront of it, and if so; why?
Market pressure has been pushing workplaces to continuously update its resources and be as technologically advanced as possible. Many of these changes have had an enormous impact on the workplace and have pushed companies to work in innovative ways, but others haven’t. Some of these ‘important digital transformations’ have had either a negligible effect or a negative effect.
A recent survey reviewing enterprise scale digital transformations, asking companies about their views and experiences on it, showed 88% of the companies claimed they were implementing digital transformations, but a shocking amount of these companies didn’t understand what digital transformation was. In fact, about 25% didn’t even know what they were heading towards, what they were trying to ‘improve’ and had lost sight of the original planned outcome.
This shows the fact companies are feeling pressured into making these changes to remain relevant, despite not understanding or needing the process to take place.
Ironically, when you look at wider economic cycles and technological development that impacts on business processes, we have been through similar scenarios in the past. It was only back in the 90’s when organisations started needing IS Managers instead of IT Management due to the realisation that information was ‘king’, not the infrastructure upon which it sat. Analytics and customer insight were major areas of investment, especially in the more forward-thinking organisations of that time. This change of focus led to large scale transformation programmes plus an increase in awareness of both the importance of data, and customer experience as ‘online’ became a reality. From a leadership point of view the challenges then and now are very similar; driving better understanding of employees, customers and the usage of data for more effective decision making.
Analytics, and all the new ways to gather them is another area of digital transformation that is often talked about, people are predicting analytics and AI to grow even more in 2018 with companies investing increasing amounts of money into software and research. But is the researched being used well? According to numerous sources many people aren’t always getting enough useful information from analytics and data science, or at least using it effectively. This really makes you question; have businesses learnt the lessons of the past; have they understood the outcomes they are striving for?
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