How can Organisations Improve the Implementation of their Digital Transformation Projects?
Dr Costas Chryssou
June 24, 2024
tamegon Innovation and Growth Advisory Firm
According to Forbes more than 76% of digital transformation (DT) projects fail to achieve their desired benefits for the organisation. The reasons mostly quoted for so many failings include:
- lack of leadership,
- treating technology as a panacea,
- absence of defined goals from the outset,
- not having a clear idea of internal capabilities,
- not understanding the people aspect of the organisation, and
- misalignment between business and technology parts of the organisation.
Regardless of the above outlined difficulties in successfully implementing DT projects, specifically with sustainability in mind, DT is a necessity for all organisations across industries and sectors to remain competitive and relevant to their customers while harnessing technology and change to capitalise on internal efficiencies.
So how can organisations improve the implementation of their DT projects ensuring the desired benefits are achieved, and the specific organisational changes (impacts) are introduced?
Reflecting on successfully implemented DT projects in several organisations, we have found that following the implementation phases, broadly described below, significantly improves the likelihood of success:
Phase I - Designing and Focusing Investment
To successfully implement a digital transformation project organisations need to firstly gain a good understanding of the "As-Is" - where they are today, challenges they face, and opportunities they can harness through digitalisation, either internally or externally to grow and develop a sustainable future. During Phase I organisations need to answer questions such as,
- How can digitalisation strengths be utilised better?
- How can digitalisation weaknesses be turned into strengths?
- How can opportunities be seized through effective digitalisation?
- How can threats and disruption be avoided?
We have found that a good starting point for any organisation to gain a good understanding of their internal capabilities and assess their digital maturity is to use tools such as the one described in the below link http://digital.sa.gov.au/resources/topic/digital-government/digital-transformation-toolkit. Such a tool, among many others, enables any organisation to explore current capabilities across five pillars, namely Governance and Leadership, People and Culture, Capacity and Capability, Innovation and Technology, and assess their level of competence across five levels of maturity from minimal to transformed.
A
SWOT analysis
for digitalisation further allows an organisation to reflect on their internal challenges and strengths (e.g. improving internal company performance) and external opportunities and threats (e.g. external capabilities when dealing with customers and partners) and coupled with the digital maturity assessment findings to define the
objective(s)
for their DT project and the specific outputs and outcomes expected.
Phase II - Developing a Roadmap
The roadmap phase aims to plan how to achieve the objective(s) defined in the current state review phase of the organisation, described above. During Phase II possible alternative implementation paths should be described, the types of resources needed to implement the solution(s) should be determined, and the metrics for evaluating the success of the implementation should be defined.
Ideally, development work should take place in iterations. Therefore, the roadmap should be broken down into manageable chunks - each iteration bringing the overall solution(s) closer to the defined objective(s).
Phase III - Execution
During the execution phase, the starting point is the roadmap defined in Phase II. We have found that the launch of pilot projects is the best way to successfully implement the defined roadmap. For example, a small-scale prototype or Proof-of-Concept (PoC) solution should be implemented to test the feasibility of the solution(s) enabling the organisation to receive feedback from users and before committing to a larger-scale costly implementation.
By following the above three-phased process, we have found that organisations can gain a better understanding of what specifically they are trying to achieve through their investment in DT, their current internal capabilities and capacity, and the specific organisational benefits of the overall project. By building a roadmap leading to the implementation of the chosen solution(s) based on an iterative process that includes pilot projects and metrics to measure success, organisations can further greatly enhance the likelihood of success.
Find out more about our digital transformation framework here.
Access our digital transformation articles and insights here.
Costas Chryssou
MBA, PhD
Founder and Managing Director
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