Digital transformation: the alarm bells are ringing…
Have a look at this article about the much needed technology updates at the White House, which the Obama administration is implementing, aware that the world’s leading superpower cannot be run using cathode ray televisions, desk telephones that nobody knows how to program anymore, along with network connections that constantly fail, and all held together by the technological equivalent of bits of string and duct tape. When it comes to digital transformation, to changes in methodology and adaptation, our businesses should bear in mind that the White House, the place where the most important decisions in the world are taken, has been stuck somewhere in the late 20th century. How about your business?
Then of course there is the leak of the personal details of every single person in Turkey, all 50 million of them, which are now online: a blunder that puts the White House’s shortcomings in perspective. And don’t take any notice of the nonsense the head of security comes out with: the answer doesn’t lie with complicated passwords and arcane procedures. The issue is not so much about magic recipes, but more about didactics.
Now think about the possible relationship between the two, and when, because if you do nothing it’s simply a question of time before something like this happens in your company. We’ve been putting off essential change in our companies for years. Everytime I find somebody who enters my page still using Windows XP, an operating system from 2001 that is no longer supported, I realize that asking such people to update their systems is in reality to come up against the absurd and unconscious corporate policies that keep them in the stone age of technology and that exposes them to any digital criminal with half a brain.
It’s not the workforce’s fault, but that of some director who still thinks computers are just sophisticated typewriters. If you piled up the technology in your company, would it be like the photograph, ready to be taken to the nearest dump? Do most of your employees have better technology in their pockets than you provide for them at work?
And no, digital transformation is not just about updating systems and throwing some old kit out and replacing it with new stuff. You’ve already made that mistake. It’s not (just) about hardware and software. It’s about rethinking your information flows and the dynamics of your work to try to squeeze every possible advantage out of digitalization. It’s about preventing one-way information trips, it’s about being prepared to change procedures, to face up to attitudes such as “this is what we’ve always done here,” about changing attitudes to what being at work means, or old fashioned approaches that haven’t been changed for decades, and to be able to open your mind to possibilities that you will never have even thought of.
It’s thinking about how your company looks when an outsider comes along and asks you, “but you don’t still do things like that, do you?” How do you think you’re going to attract talent, or hold on to what you already have if your company just shuffles paper around from one place to another like in the old days of ten, twenty, thirty years ago? Could you explain to a teenager how your company works without feeling ashamed? Could that teenager come up with ideas about how to improve your systems simply by applying the common sense and logic that comes from having an open mind? Digital transformation means rethinking your business and seeing it from a different perspective and filtering it through the optic that technology offers.
It’s no easy task and certainly cannot be explained in a couple of afternoon sessions; what’s more it’s not even within everybody’s reach. But you have to get started on it. Now. Not tomorrow, or the day after. Now. The gap between your company and reality grows with each day. You ignore the alarm bells at your own risk…
(En español, aquí)
