DigitalTransformationTalk: Mitigating risks to your digital transformation

On 7 March, the DigitalTransformationTalk host Kevin Craine was joined by Jay Goldman, Co-Founder and CEO, SENSEI LABS; Jonathan Alloy, Vice President Customer Experience & Innovation Consulting, Publicis Sapient; and Shreyas Becker, Director, Global AI & Data Products Industrial Affairs

Sanofi.

 

Views on news

 

The Gartner 2023 Board of Directors Survey, which included 281 board directors and members of various boards across industries and geographies, aims to understand the group’s focus on investments in digital acceleration; sustainability; and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

 

Digital tech initiatives and workforce issues (e.g., retention, training and hiring) are expected to be the top strategic business priorities for boards of directors for 2023-2024. In the coming years, boards of directors anticipate more investment in and focus on sustainability and (DEI), which are primarily funded by an increasing operational expenditure (opex) budget.

 

The report highlights the importance of aligning digital initiatives with strategic business goals. If you establish how your digital transformation reduces costs or generates new revenues for the business, then you have achieved alignment.

 

How can digital innovators get a seat at the C-suite table?

 

A truly transformative programme works across functions and different geographies too. In the case of such profound changes, value creation takes time, and sponsors should always remember that.

 

The strongest driver of a DT should be improving customer experience. Customers see the best experience they have in the digital industry as a baseline and all service providers in any sectors will be measured against that top experience.

 

Digital has become table-stakes now, but we’re not in a post-digital world yet, contrary to what the article suggests. When it comes to digital transformation, the Board shouldn’t just be comfortable with risks but also ready to accept potential failures. Nowadays big DT programmes are broken down into smaller projects, which can improve the overall success rate of transformations, even if some of the smaller projects fail. A high percentage of DT programmes don’t have a significant change management aspect to them.

 

They just presume that internal stakeholders will be ready to jump on board and do their share of the transformation, which often isn’t the case.

 

Those who have ideas regarding how to adopt new technology and improve processes shouldn’t resign themselves to not being heard by leaders.

 

There are various ways of communicating their message to top management – through allies, coalitions and surrogates. Even when you try to get sponsorship for a point solution for technology, you need to think in terms of the business’s end-to-end customer management and risk programmes. You need to be able to explain to the business how they can benefit from a tech solution.

 

Today the biggest risk is not moving fast enough. To manage it, businesses need to think of how they can cannibalise and out-innovate themselves.

 

The panel’s advice

 

Ask yourself whether your digital transformation programme is genuinely transformative.

 

Prepare risk mitigation plans (a library of best practices) to ensure that problems are less likely to happen. 

Think of the incentive structure of the people you need to collaborate with.

 

Their main interest is most probably driving revenues and will collaborate with you only if it will drive their performance too.

Avoid tech jargon and explain your goals in business terms, quantify outcomes.

 

Leverage small DT success stories to get buy-in for big projects.

 

To monitor if the DT project is on track, look at your leading indicators while the project is in progress, rather than the lagging indicators once it’s over.

 

Start small with solutions that can address particular pain points and then scale up.