Creating the Right Culture for a Successful Digital Transformation

This post is part of our continuing series, Your Guide to a Successful Digital Transformation.

Culture drives success more than any other factor. Without a culture that encourages innovation, collaboration, and a freedom to fail, programs can often become limited to only specific areas of the business or are unable to achieve the transformative benefits.  

As we define our strategy, here are four key questions to consider about your organization’s culture:

Is our culture accepting of change?

The first thing to ask ourselves about our culture as we work though out Digital Transformation strategy is how much resistance to change we anticipate encountering. While not a barrier to Digital Transformation, if we anticipate a high level of resistance to change either organizationally or in specific areas of our operations, we will need to emphasize a longer lead time on many of the activities to engage with people and win their engagement including getting their input on strategy, initiatives and process to give them ownership of the change. You may even need to start with very small and targeted projects that are easy wins to show the value of the initiative that is kicking off.

Is there a fear that we will reduce workforce due to automation?

This is a very common concern of many employees and is even taken to the extent of intentionally obscuring process activities so that discovery teams don’t identify improvement opportunities in their area so their job is secure. While communicating the strategy and goals of the transformation is commonly performed, organizations that have a higher fear of workforce reduction should also consider building in case studies of how work efforts are re-allocated versus eliminated.

Are we willing to fail in order to succeed?

Not every transformation idea will be a home run and not every data set will support analytics. The key is to maintain agility and be willing to step back when the value isn’t developing as anticipated while making people understand that our process is intentionally designed to let projects that have reached non-value add exit the development pipeline. Even failures can help us succeed later since many of the connections and learnings can be applied to other projects.

Do our employees understand what digital transformation means?

If you Google “Digital Transformation” dozens of articles will return with wildly different definitions of what digital transformation is. As you develop a Digital Transformation strategy for your organization, ensure that your definition is shared broadly across the organization so everyone is speaking the same language.

For information about how we can assist in your organization’s digital transformation, contact us. We are here to help.

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