Why you probably need to stop your Digital Transformation

It will come as little surprise that in a recent survey almost 100% of our customers define themselves as either starting or being in the middle of a Digital Transformation. The immediate need for technology change and remote service provision caused by the COVID-19 pandemic made many organisations realise that they could achieve in months what had previously been taking them years. Suddenly, companies that had hesitated to migrate key services to cloud platfroms, upgrade elements of their infrastructure or deploy large scale process automation found themselves making a great leap forward.

The effect of this has been so dramatic that even for a non-IT audience a common response in annual surveys has been:

Question:

Who led your companies Digital Transformation?

Answer:

COVID-19

The implications of this perception for Digital Transformation Programmes are profound. Until 2019 there was a common theme to these programmes. Organisations (perhaps yourself included) were following a structured approach with quarterly plans, annual objectives and multi-million-dollar budgets. A prime example can be found in Gartner’s 2020 roadmap (https://www.gartner.com/en/publications/the-it-roadmap-for-digital-business-transformation). However, the ability of most companies to make profound changes in short timeframe without this complexity highlights the mediocre performance of Transformation efforts to date. What has been revealed is that most transformation programmes are in fact non transformative at all, they are simply large traditional change initiatives trading on hype and buzzwords to keep themselves going.

Evidence of this has been readily apparent even during rapid technology projects. As highlighted by Forbes C-level survey in 2021 most senior leaders are unhappy with their Digital Transformation efforts and perceive them as delivery meagre returns. In our own customer surveys, the question ‘are you happy with your Digital Transformation performance?’ receives over 75% negative responses (https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2021/05/23/why-digital-transformations-are-failing/?sh=f8d8cc07617a). The hardest part of solving a problem is admitting you have one, the next part is deciding if you are just off track or, as we suggest, you need to stop your Transformation and re-focus.

The answer can be found in three questions we ask customers that they most often struggle, or find it impossible, to answer:

1. When did your Digital Transformation start? – most organisations, especially below leadership level have no sense of when transformation began.
2. By what date or measure will your transformation be complete? – there is a huge sense of fatigue with large programmes that seem to roll year through year with no end in sight
3. What about it is genuinely Transformative? – most transformation’s fail to deliver on their promise because they are mostly just a mix of some automation efforts, process improvement and legacy IT updates.

If you cannot come up with a convincing response you are probably one of those that need to STOP their transformation efforts and ask what your real strategy is. More and more often we are asked by leaders, ‘what the top 5 reasons transformations fail?’ or ‘what are the main pitfalls in delivering transformation?’. The real problem is the programme’s themselves; most are made up of 90% standard IT change projects and initiatives with the genuinely innovative and differentiating 10% of projects buried in the mix. Without clear ownership and focus on deliver these projects often fail to materialise and it is the business and usual projects that contribute to this sense of meagre returns and lost promise.

By now you are probably asking how feasible it is to stop an in-progress transformation programme or, if you could, what you would do instead. Here are the recommendations that are yielding the best results:

• Check your strategy – Go back to the basics. We have seen organisations mid-way through multi-year transformations that have no clear Vision, have lost track of the benefits they are looking to deliver and have no referenceable strategy to guide them.
• Simplify, shrink & shorten – Get rid of the ‘transformation’ label. Focus on simplifying programmes to enable teams to focus on priority projects. Shrink the scope of projects where necessary to improve delivery cadence and shorten programme horizons to deliver meaningful benefits in year.
• Focus, focus, focus – Focus is the art of saying no. One of the easiest, and best, ways to improve returns is simply to reduce the scale and volume of change you are undertaking and prioritise successful delivery. One of the most common issues across all organisations today is the perceived impact of resource constraints on delivering. Cancel or pause the bottom 25% of your change portfolio for 6 months.

You should by now have a clear sense of where you are in your Digital Transformation journey. If you were able to answer the three questions above try asking one of your peers, or team and compare your answers. If they don’t match or, like most of our customers you struggle to answer them at all then you might need to call time on your Digital Transformation efforts… 

If you feel that you are not getting value from your Digital Transformation efforts or would like an external audit, please get in touch at matthew.east@kainos.com to find out about our Digital Advisory HealthCheck service.