Agreed! Such a simple sentence and yet such a complex challenge for many organizations. It’s why — while I fully support all your five top priorities — your second point about culture and leadership is in my experience probably the most important and, alas, challenging one, at least for established organizations of a certain size (say 2,000+ employees).

For companies to fully ingrain digital in their DNA, the challenge is more complex than just launching a few initiatives in order to stipulate a nice, new culture. It’s rather a systemical challenge.

Let me briefly elaborate on what I mean by “ingraining digital in their DNA”. As your whole map of current and future priorities epitomizes, digital transformation is not an one-off endeavour. Quite the opposite: At it’s core it is the challenge of making an organization prone to constant change and adaption of new methods. That is a tough task for most companies (at least the ones I know, which are a few).

I argue that achieving this is so challenging not only because of the well-documented human tendency to avoid change and embrace the status-quo but that on top of this most organizations are structurally not designed to achieve it. A few of the problems I allude to: Having a few decision makers with structural power only; building companies around functions and giving them incentives to ‘protect their turf’; stupid incentive mechanisms which stimulate short-term decision-making; et cetera, et cetera… If you are interested in the topic: I explained this in way more detail in my essay “The Antifragile Organization” over here (admittedly a rather lenghty read).

Thus, to sum up my point: I think your 5 priorities are spot-on (I also really like the fact that you didn’t go for the fancy-yet-way-out-there-for-most-companies stuff — smart to have a long-list :)). Yet I believe the second point deserves more emphasize in comparison, as it is may be the most critical one and the one most underestimated by organizations in practice.