We have been talking about digital travel. Old uncertain approaches will not work; You need absolute clarity on digital demands, digital customer insight, strong leadership, and unmatched agility. If there is one theme that I constantly hear, it is that consumers expect the brands they interact with to provide a seamless digital experience in their interactions. That is applicable to all types of industries, be it retail, information technology or something else, and they all have their own way of defining the digital experience.
I have recently witnessed few stores in my area, one was closing (Toys “R” Us) and another was heading toward transformation (Target) with a new consumer experience. The reason for bankruptcy could be different, but above all, companies born before the digital age must transform substantially to remain relevant and that begins with the digital transformation of small business processes, which are the key consumer experience .
We know this from experience, on average, resources do not move between business units in large organizations. And this is doubly true for the digital approach, which demands special attention. Project managers in many organizations lack clarity on what “digital” means for approach. They underestimate the degree to which digital is disrupting their businesses, accounts, and projects. They also overlook the speed with which digital ecosystems are blurring the boundaries of the industry and shifting the competitive balance. What’s more, responding to digital by building new businesses and diverting resources from old ones can be a threat to individual project managers and executives, who may therefore be slow to accept the necessary change.
In my experience, the only way leaders can overcome inactivity is to take bold steps to understand the following areas:
You must fight resistance to change. You must understand the customer’s vision for the digital journey through programmatic efforts. You should consider a robust digital approach by inspecting the results as you go. And it must fight the impossibility of knowing, a constant challenge given the simultaneous need to digitize its core and innovate with new business processes.
1. Resistance to change
Many project managers and senior executives are not fully fluent in what digital is, much less aware of the ways it can change the way their businesses operate or the competitive context. That is challenging. Project managers unfamiliar with digital are much more likely to fall victim to the “shiny object” syndrome – investing in great digital technologies without a clear understanding of how they will generate value in their own accounts / projects. They are also more likely to make fragmented, overlapping, or subscale digital investments; pursuing initiatives in the wrong order; or omitting fundamental movements that would allow the more advanced ones to work. Ultimately, this lack of grounding slows down the speed at which a business implements new digital technologies. In an era of powerful pioneer benefits, winners routinely lead the pack in leveraging cutting-edge digital technologies at scale to advance further. Having only a corrective understanding of trends and technologies has become dangerous.
Improve your technology skills –
For inspiration on how to increase the collective technology skills of your accounts, consider the experience of a global IT company that knew it had to digitize, but did not think its leadership team had the experience to drive the necessary changes. The company created a digital training portal to help educate its leadership on relevant digital technologies and trends. The training leaders also brought in external experts on some topics that the company did not have enough internal experience to address.
Complementing the training effort, an assessment of the digital capabilities of the entire organization and an assessment of the company culture was carried out. This provided a base of facts, that everyone could understand, on what the organization needed to build in the course of digital transformation. This can help project managers and executives prepare for new technology skills.
2. Understand the customer’s vision of the digital journey.
Being left behind by digital pioneers can be dangerous for the future of your projects / accounts. But many account managers or executives may perceive that responding to digital – making big bets, building new businesses, diverting resources from old ones – is dangerous to their own future. If you want to make big digital moves, you need to understand the customer’s view on the digital journey and fight the fear that your senior team and managers will inevitably experience.
Projects that manage to create a value proposition for the digital customer do not arrive by accident. They develop a clear vision of how they will meet their customers’ digital needs, set goals against that vision, and execute, often over the course of several years. Often times, projects that are not succeeding simply have not painted a clear picture of what they want, or need, to be when they “grow up” digitally.
Design a programmatic effort –
You should design a programmatic effort with the same rigor that you would insist on redesigning key processes in your accounts or projects. Typically this means making a clear case that executives can’t hide from digital change and that encouraging and accelerating change, rather than chasing it, can create more value. Then you must give executives the tools and support network they must have to be successful as leaders on that journey. Two important points where the whole focus should go:
First, stay on top of technology trends, which includes staying informed about relevant emerging technology and changes in consumer behavior when it comes to technology.
Second, establish processes designed to generate portfolios of potential ideas for the future state of the customer journey. These processes should allow your account to create business hypotheses and examine and test them through customer research. In turn, new ideas can be aligned with the vision of how the customer of the future should interact with the brand or business processes, iterating along the way as more learnings emerge.
3. Solid digital focus
The pursuit of an aggressive digital approach involves leaps into the unknown: simultaneously, you are likely moving into new areas and fixing existing businesses with new technologies. In addition, in many digital projects, the advantage of being a pioneer makes it necessary not only to change direction, but also to do it faster than its peers. The combination of ambiguity and the need for speed sometimes leads to guesswork and movements that are hasty or ill-thought out, and anxiety about whether a move is not going to work or just needs more time, hence a solid digital approach with several stages to examine. results
Inspect the results on the go:
One way to combat guesswork is to anchor your approach decisions to a thesis about the business outcomes that different digital investments will produce. It’s more about thinking that you draw quick, basic lessons from the data to determine if your business logic is correct. In other words, it means finding out if there is enough value to make something worth investing in, as part of an even more learning process. This approach increases the odds of a successful implementation – a well-articulated view of the results means you can keep track of how well the approach is working.
4. Struggle – Impossibility of knowing
We know that most companies, including mine, try and struggle to do two things at once: reinvent the core by digitizing and automating some of its key elements, for example, and creating innovative new digital businesses. The challenge is acute due to the dizzying pace of digital change and the uncertainty surrounding the adoption of new technologies. Even if autonomous vehicle technology works, for example, when will most people actually start using them? Given the impossibility of knowing, it’s easy to end up with an unfocused hodgepodge of digital initiatives.
Rethink the experiment
Real success in digital is rarely about providing the exact same products and services, just through a digital pipeline. Netflix went from DVDs to streaming. Uber created the world’s largest car service without buying a vehicle or hiring a driver. Businesses that “successfully cross the chasm” to digital efficiency often find that they need to provide what they used to charge for free, sell as a subscription what used to be “on demand”, and rethink how they earn income from the value they used to charge. believe. Those who do so flexibly may often find that adopting a digital strategy or approach offers more scale, revenue, and profit than the legacy approach, but requires experimentation, risk-taking, and, to be blunt, some failure in the process. path. .