These days we are experimenting a great focus on Digital Transformation. In Spain, this is a trending topic in the recent years. I had the opportunity to experiment using digital transformation in different roles. This post is not centered around what is digital transformation, but in my personal experience over these years in those types of projects.
My first impression on these projects is that a great part of them start by identifying what technologies the enterprise wants, or supports, even before having the processes under change. This can be due to IT compliance rules (that may or may not fit with the requirements of the transformation), or simply by misunderstanding the transformation process itself.
There are some obstacles that can make this process real complex, or make it useless.
Resuming my experience I noticed that Digital Transformation is not like the Gattopardo (Tommasi de Lampedusa), where you change all in order to not change anything. Here you want to change the way your enterprise work, so a real change in processes and in people is needed.
Adopting change frictions by IT can raise due to the fact that IT department is not part of the change as an actor in these examples, so it is ‘suffering’ the change. Corporate IT rules are necessary, and the correct governance of systems is vital for an enterprise. IT department plays a paramount role in the process of evaluating and constructing that change.
Another friction in embracing the change can raise by the worker itself: changing processes and tools produce stress. As humans, we have the tendency to ‘not to change what is working’. Workers, at any level, are comfortable with familiar tools and well known processes, is totally logic. It is important to involucre them in the process as actors too. It is important that they can see that this change is for make life simpler for them too and they need the opportunity of contributing to this change.
A last evidence that I found is the lake of governance, I think this is the main root cause of all the previous ones. Such transformation is matter for all departments of an enterprise, there’s a need for a consensus as larger as you can. A real change in the mindset of all actors is the real transformation itself, without this change there’s no site for Digital Transformation.
I would advise that the center of this transformation are people, it is all about its interactions, more than processes and technologies. Giving people the attention that is needed and giving the power to participate in defining the change is a key for success.