Digital is culture


“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” — Peter Drucker

Guess we always knew this but needed data to support our thinking: digital is less about the technology in itself but more about the mindset.

Recently, MIT Sloan Management Review, in collaboration with Deloitte, conducted a survey of more than 4,800 business executives, managers and analysts to help identify the challenges and opportunities with digital business.

It suggests most organisations enlist 5 objectives for their digital strategy:

  1. improve customer experience;
  2. increase efficiency;
  3. improve business decision making;
  4. improve innovation;
  5. transform the business.

I think transforming the business is a cornerstone objective with the least tangibility of all but has a maximum “feel right” impact. To customer experience you can tag a metric, for instance, the conversion rate; similarly, innovation can be measured by no. of new products/services launched. Ergo, measuring business transformation could be considered as a function of digital maturity. And it will reflect how the transformation has created new ways of working.

The graph on the left clearly highlights the importance of fostering an environment that will enable successful digital transformation.

In this mix, what could IT organisations do to steer digital transformation for maximising outcome?

Clearly, the answer will have to fit in the company, business it operates or aspires to play in and, of course, strategy. However, this should help in initiating a conversation around the IT strategy that will enable digital.

To begin with, IT needs to capture the business demand. The demand is a derivative of the objectives. For example, increasing efficiency. It comprises improving productivity by implementing collaborative tools. One such enterprise tool from the startup world that has reached a unicorn status is Slack. [Slack is just the tip of the iceberg for enterprise IT suggests a recent article from TechCrunch]. Such a tool, which is easy to use, customer-centric and digitally native, will help in meeting the soft cultural changes that digital strategy demands.

One way of looking at the approach is, also: bi-modal IT, a phrase still relevant and provides a fairly good operating framework to start with. And the five objectives stated above help in establishing the sort of IT investments needed to accomplish them to enable digital strategy — investments on tools such as Slack, Google Apps, Box et al. (Click here for mobile enterprise tech players)

Lastly, what is often missed is change management. While having the right technology is paramount, not using the apt strategy to lead the change across the organisation will undermine the maturity organisation has in fact reached. Here too, we can take a leaf from lean startup playbook. Digital initiatives should use agile and continuous delivery methodologies. The roll-out process would sift through from evangelist groups to across the organisation to reach ~100% adoption rate — it will indeed take an effort to cross-chasm. [One example of poor adoption process is: running both Livelink and SharePoint simultaneously, because not all folks have moved their documents to the new tool — the old app lives on and business continue to cough up its cost of operations]

In essence, digital strategy, from an IT perspective, is about finding the rights tools and helping lead the transformation and digital adoption — which will truly enable organisation to embark on a mindset change, to be more agile and nimble. Else, as Peter Drucker said, culture will eat your strategy.

(The full MIT and Deloitte study can be found here)