Nick Denning, CEO of IT consultancy Diegesis and veteran of multiple successful digital transformation projects, looks at the importance of a pro-digital transformation culture and how to turn your workforce into digital champions
Existing systems may be expensive to run and difficult to change, but they work. Until they don’t. When the business needs to change, then digital transformation could be essential. This is more likely to succeed if people are willing participants and even champions. How can organisations get everyone on board and build a pro-digital transformation culture?
Time for a change?
As competitors, customers, and technology change, business requirements alter, and systems need to adapt. Resistance is possible from staff who perceive a vested interest in legacy technology and systems, keeping the organisation tethered to the past. It is essential for a successful digital project that the leadership team creates a pro-digital transformation culture in the business.
Building a pro-digital transformation culture
Creating a culture to drive business through new technology and methods involves a combination of leadership, communication, training, quality, and continuous improvement. Objectives must be clear, and everyone must see a positive benefit. If previous projects have failed, then addressing concerns and keeping people motivated and engaged is essential.
The board can demonstrate commitment by driving change through a steering committee chaired by a senior executive. This committee needs the authority to engage stakeholders, which control the strategy and drive decisions to deliver effective change at pace.
Articulate a clear vision and strategy
Define a clear digital transformation vision and strategy, but don’t keep it in the boardroom. Clearly communicate why digital transformation is important, what the goals are, how it aligns with the organisation’s overall mission and objectives, the benefits of success, and the risks of failure.
It is also important to manage communications if there are commercial issues associated with suppliers or where uncertainty and rumour could cause employees to worry.
Communication cannot just be top-down. Encourage open dialogue, create channels for questions and concerns, identify issues, and provide feedback about the transformation process. If there are people critical to the transformation or able to obstruct progress, what incentives can encourage them to engage?
Employees who are initially most sceptical can often be turned into the greatest advocates if handled correctly. They know where the pitfalls are and can help to overcome them. Most importantly, ensure stakeholders can trust communications. Give regular progress updates linked to evidence that the plan is being delivered.
Opportunity in digital transformation
All change creates opportunity but also involves business and personal risk. The current team may not have the experience to manage such a project, yet it is vital to create a positive culture.
Bring in the right people to lead best practice adoption so that from the beginning, staff see that commitments given by the business are kept, and trust is retained. Create an eager desire to be on the project.
If there is a need to shed people over time, then manage this carefully. Plan for early internal transfers to new and exciting long-term roles to allay fear among staff critical to success, motivating them to remain. This ensures critical knowledge is transferred through a documented handover process. It also starts the concept of change, and that information sharing is essential to building a pro-digital transformation culture.
Empowerment and experimentation
Digital Transformation changes technology and transforms how an organisation works. Adopting new methodologies such as user experience (UX) design, developing an agile architecture platform to respond quickly to changing business needs, and creating better applications are important.
However, success requires staff to be trained and gain experience in these new technologies, and adoption should be paced. Technology expertise must be built up without losing existing business knowledge.
Allow time to train existing staff who already know the business and bring in technology experts with enough time to learn the business. Start slow, experiment, innovate, have parallel workstreams, and deliver in phases for a competent and confident team that establishes standards and proves the approach to de-risk the design before scaling up.
Foster a culture where employees are encouraged to experiment, identify and undergo risks with mitigations in place, and come up with creative solutions using digital tools. Celebrate and reward employees who contribute innovative ideas or drive successful digital initiatives. Make it more valuable to come up with innovations rather than profit from outdated knowledge.
Embrace agile methodologies by breaking down large projects into smaller, manageable tasks that can be completed in iterative cycles. Innovations can be tried quickly but discarded if they don’t bring the expected benefits. Access to relevant data and analytics tools is important to encourage data- driven decision-making rather than emotional or political responses.
Change management/change culture
If the aim is digital transformation, then it would be foolish not to plan for how the organisation manages change. It is likely that the first thing that must change is the culture. Start with changing the management culture and be sure to anticipate and address resistance to change with a well-defined plan that includes communication, stakeholder engagement, and addresses concerns head-on rather than ignoring them.
Identify and empower digital transformation champions. Select individuals and teams enthusiastic about digital transformation who can serve as role models and advocates. These digital ambassadors may come from unexpected places. They might be junior employees who bring fresh ideas or longer-serving staff who have experience of historic project successes and failures.
If there is a history of resistance to change, then it may be essential to create a separate team that develops the new culture. Recruit from within the organisation, individual by individual and train them into the new way of working.
Think big, act fast, do small
Winning the hearts and minds of all stakeholders relies on creating the vision and delivering outputs regularly while showing clear and successful progress towards the end goal.
It is essential to acknowledge the changes, from capital projects to operational spending and continuous improvement. Digital transformation, once adopted, continues with a significant impact on an organisation’s model for managing staff and delivering financial performance.
These strategies, simple to describe but difficult to implement, can deliver a culture that embraces digital transformation, fosters innovation, and positions itself for continuing success in the digital age.
