Insights For A Successful Digital Transformation

Why are digital transformations often underperforming?

Some companies complain about the ROI – lower than expected - of their digital initiatives, feel dispersed or over solicited by technological opportunities, when not outpaced by new entrants, start-ups. Others testify about a true difficulty in accelerating their time-to-market, have a customer experience that takes only feeble improvement steps or are discontented by their IT agility and openness to external ecosystems.

Now that we have gained failures, successes, i.e., significant experience, I would like to share in this short post some insights acquired across several industries, as doer, as advisor or as sparring partner with peers from multiple industries.

Preliminary words

The concept of “digital transformation” is often overused in managerial speeches. Let us align, with a systemic perspective, what transformation primarily means in the ongoing digital era:

1. Leverage digital channels and new ways of interacting with Customers, to offer a privileged experience, in an omnichannel channel context that fulfills customer expectations (historically, the first impact of digital, called at that time the “online transformation”).
2. Digitize and automate smartly in order to revamp business processes, tasks, business & IT operations, starting with the simplest and continuing with more complex ones that require more…