Is Your Company Winning the Race to Digital Transformation?
What’s happening this week at the intersection of management and technology.
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Tech Savvy
Midpoint in the race to digital transformation: In some respects, the digitization of business is a pretty nebulous subject. It’s not like a company achieves digital transformation on some specific date — the darn target moves as new technologies and applications appear. That’s one reason why Jane McConnell’s 10th annual inquiry into “The Organization in the Digital Age” is worth a look.
McConnell frames digital transformation as an organizational imperative that manifests itself in three dimensions: people, workplace, and technology. Over the past decade, she has been gauging the progress that a broad, international group of 300+ companies and other institutions has been making toward this imperative in three stages.
The Starting stage is defined by an individual (rather than organizational) digital awareness — digital initiatives are ad hoc and infrequent; senior leaders are minimally involved; most decisions are made by traditional hierarchy; work mainly takes place in established channels, with some virtual venues. The Developing stage is defined by mobilization — a compelling vision for digital transformation exists; senior managers are leading the charge; most functions, levels, and entities are involved in digital initiatives. The Maturing stage is defined by trust — digital is considered a strategic asset; it is embedded in work practices; much decision making is decentralized; information and collaboration is organization-wide and includes customers and external partners.
“The 2016 data shows 16% of the survey participants in the Maturing stage, 52% in the Developing stage, and 32% in the Starting stage,” McConnell reports. Where does your company place?
Questions for digital disrupters: It’s good to see that the companies that create the technologies that are forcing the rest of the business world to undertake digital transformation are not immune from its dictates. Turnabout, after all, is fair play.
“The technology, media, and telecommunications (TMT) sectors are in the vanguard, bringing these new opportunities to market — even as their legacy businesses are threatened by them,” writes a team of BCG consultants in a white paper aimed at the disruptors. “TMT companies have begun to digitize their core businesses and enter new disruptive businesses, often through M&A and partnerships. Still, they are subject to massive dislocation and attack.