So you’re trying to get a Digital Transformation program off the ground, huh? Wondering why it’s so hard to find good “Digital” people? You may well be putting them off by the language you use. As someone who’s been “Digital” since about 8 years old, here are some of the warning signs
1) You call it “Digital”
If you’re calling it “Digital”, or even giving “it” a name, then it’s pretty clear you don’t understand it. It’s something else, something distinct and separate. It’s A Thing, and therefore not interwoven into every bit of your business, operations and plans. And if it’s not, then by comparison, you suck at it.
Although it’s a popular misconception that Eskimos have no word for “snow”, it’s a useful analogy, so I’ll illustrate this instead with a Terry Pratchett quote:
It’s often said that eskimos have fifty words for snow.
This is not true.
It’s also said that dwarfs have two hundred words for rock.
They don’t. They have no words for rock, in the same way as fish have no words for water. They do have words for igneous rock, sedimentary rock, metamorphic rock, rock underfoot, rock dropping on your helmet from above, and rock which looked interesting and which they could have sworn they left here yesterday. But what they don’t have is a word meaning ‘rock’. Show a dwarf a rock, and he sees, for example, an inferior piece of crystalline sulphate of barytes.
Everything is ultimately digital now. Those paper forms? How were they printed? How were they designed? Digital. The phone on which you have supposedly non-digital conversations? Digital. But here’s the thing:
If you’re calling it “Digital”, you’re advertising the fact that you’re an outsider. A stranger in a strange land, pointing at an inferior sample of crystalline sulphate of barytes and calling it a rock.
2) You have a separate team called “Digital”
What’s Amazon’s “Digital” team called? Netflix’s? Do they even have one? No, in the same way as the TV networks don’t have a “Colour TV” team. For bonus points, is your “Digital” team only a small proportion of your total workforce? What does that say about your priorities? You’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
3) You think of “Digital” as “something the techies do”
I once had a CEO who thought that the final two weeks before launch of a critical product that had been in development for over two years, was the right time to “do the UX”. As if User Experience could be sprinkled on top like a layer of glitter, and that would make it so shiny that everyone would fall in love with it. In two weeks. It’s like Steve Jobs spending 4yrs+ on making the iPhone, and giving Johnny Ive just the final month to “do the design”.
Likewise, “doing digital” has to be a whole-business operation, or it is doomed from the start. Time and again we encounter “digital” projects that are stifled into failure by hitting a hard, uncrossable boundary when their data has to go into, or come from, an offline data store. Sometimes this might be a decades-old legacy system that was never designed for its data to be used elsewhere, sometimes even a stack of paper piled high on a specific desk (or even filling a warehouse somewhere). Either the whole chain of information needs to rethought, or the digital part can only ever be essentially a bit of lipstick slapped on a pig.
4) You have a Digital Transformation program
Well done for recognising that you need to get up to speed with twenty years ago, but it highlights and advertises just how far you are behind, and how far you have to go. It can be a big challenge, and a massive achievement for the right person if they pull it off, but it takes a particularly rare kind of techie to want to take that on. Often the critical barriers are not merely technical, but contractual problems or people problems. Outsourced suppliers with no incentive to let their long-term cash cows be replaced. Internal stakeholders who actively resist change either through luddism, or fear that modernisation means efficiency gains and therefore erosion of their budget or power base.
Having a Digital Transformation program at all, shows that you’re at best only partway through winning those battles.
