Today we are faced with an ever increasing number of technological innovations which hold the potential for significant growth in our businesses. However, in exploiting these new technologies, we need to change our behavior. As an example, think of how we consume TV now, versus how we did 5 or 10 years ago. Our past consumption was governed by network channels, broadcasting programs based on schedules (schedules that were developed to match key demographics, view rates, and other demand metrics). Now, as a result of technology developments, the majority of consumers have moved to a very different model, where the consumer dictates what they watch, how they watch (i.e. varying devices), and when they watch. Combining the cord-cutting trend in recent years with the growing number of consumers who have never subscribed to cable television, a total of 24.6 million households, or 20.4% of all U.S. households, were cable-free at the end of 2015.
One thing is for certain, the rate of technological change is increasing. For enterprises this brings both tremendous opportunity as well as risk. Standstill and watch this all happen without doing anything and you will soon be struggling to remain in Business as new, smaller and more agile competitors take market share from you.
E-businesses might have considered themselves the pioneers of digital transformation back in the internet era of the 90’s. With time, we’ve since gone through several “revolutions” or “eras.” The latest evolution includes smart “things,” where people + businesses + things are able to communicate transact and negotiate with each other. The boundaries between the physical and digital worlds are blurring and more and more intelligent “things” are incorporated in the end to end processes.
This represents a real paradigm shift and something that mandates change to the existing culture in many businesses. Business leaders are often fooled into thinking that this is just an extension to their existing business whereas it is something much more. Digital Business = a new era = new internal culture shifts to enable transformation.
Finally, we should look at additional pressures driving this change. Externally, customers expect all experiences to be seamless, real-time, and productive. Internal to the enterprise, there is some general discontent in the c-suite: CEOs are expecting CIOs to not only respond to this customer wish (in a technology enabled way), but to be more aligned to the business strategy, and more and more, to be the innovation center.
You recognize a transformation is needed, you might even have different transformation processes under way, but let it be known that the biggest barrier to a successful journey is organizational resistance. If you do not pay careful attention to the following 5 areas of your company culture, your effort, time, and perhaps millions you have spent on transformation will inevitably lead to failure.
For a number of years, companies have been focused on becoming more agile—for the potential to perform faster response times, adapt quickly to market environmental factors, etc. Many of these organizations have tried innovative methodologies such as scrums, hackathons, sprints and more. However, the degree of a company’s agility correlates with its’ ability to successfully transform. If you think about it, there are mainly three types of agility: strategic agility (ie business decides to transform), organizational agility (business implements transformation processes via employees, products), and operational/delivery agility (how quickly can the desired transformation perform in measureable ways). As you might imagine, culture affects strategic agility mainly in the attitude of the business to change, while many other cultural and workforce aspects impact both organizational agility and operational agility.
There is a need for companies to exhibit two different types of collaboration to improve transformation execution.
