Culture and digital transformation

Having shifted to Twitter as my medium of choice for quick updates on interesting insights from the world of digital, it has been a while since I have posted to justanotherblog.

As a result, I have a bit of a backlog that I hope to work down over the coming months (a few book reviews, a piece or two on omnichannel design and the illusive nirvana of multi-speed for large corporates, challenges with social enterprise collaboration adoption and quite a few more).

As an easy re-entry into the blogosphere, I thought the most straightforward thing to do would be a couple of light entries on some favourite recent articles on by far the most difficult part of digital transformation in large corporates - the culture shift:

An article on HBR - The Company Cultures That Help (or Hinder) Digital Transformation (here) - is a great summary of some typical pitfalls and contains some interesting thoughts about how to approach them.

Having worked with companies, supporting them along this transformation journey, I recognise many of the patterns that the author, Jane McConnell, describes well, but the one from her research that I find the most telling is, in many ways also the most frustrating, because it is so obvious: "Too much focus on technology rather than willingness to address deep change and rethink how people work."

Anyone who has worked on practically any transformation initiative knows this to be true. And yet we still too often continue to focus on the black boxes that are "going to transform the way we work".

I work in a company with a heritage of transformative technology implementation, so I am a fan of and believer in the effect that digital technologies can have on building competitive advantage, great new engaging experience for our clients' customers and the insights that can be gleaned from the masses of data that can now be harnessed to find new and interesting insights into your customers behaviour.

HOWEVER, this only happens when the right people are enabled to make it happen.

It is clarity of business vision and purpose, experience in and a willingness to invest in people development and the right organisational structures that will help an organisation to do great things with the technology.

From my perspective, it has always been this way and probably always will be... unless the robots do take over the world, of course.

Digital is a way of doing things, a minefield, but also a mindset. So, thinking about the why first and getting the right people in place to drive a transformation, may be obvious, but it still happens too infrequently.

In short, a thoughtful article with some no-nonsense, yet hugely challenging approaches, that are too often go unresolved.

Ignore them at your peril!


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Tenure, engagement & performance

As someone who spent most of his career in organisations with strong loyalty and longer employee tenure than most, this HBR article surfaces familiar organisational challenges around engagement and performance, but also some simple and thought provoking advice.


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