In today’s complex business world, 85 percent of digitalization projects fail for various reasons. Mostly you dear readers have bitter experiences yourself. Your project might have failed because the goal and value to deliver were unclear, maybe you turned an existing process into an “electronic” one without changing it. Or (you thought) your data was not good enough to rely on and did not rethink how you capture and own this data. Or you did not allow your projects to fail (quickly) and you tried to salvage what is possible or noticed too late. Maybe your users have not accepted or used it at the end and found workarounds or have overridden your great AI results.
By no means am I not guilty of failing. I did fail with digitalization several times – but on a small scale and taking the learnings into the next and next try, not giving up, and winning at the end. Winning the digitalization game is about being flexible, and adaptable and not being afraid of failing. If it would be that easy: there is no recipe, there are components which you can use to cook success yourself, best fit to your environment. Let’s take a look at a few more of these fundamental puzzle pieces of digital success:
Strategic fundaments
Digital is a way to transform and accelerate a different mindset or process. It is always a fantastic opportunity to revisit your process efficiency or to change the process as digital enables much more detail, accuracy, and different steps that were not feasible manually before.
The first thing to work out though – what is value you intend to drive in line with the company’s strategy. Cost efficiency? Higher safety? Drive sustainability? Higher process efficiency? Offer new innovative services? Higher speed of response?
This requires also the end of the traditional COO/CIO organizations – as business teams have to be inspired by what digital can change in their world, and IT teams run better understanding of the intention from the very beginning. A united team (Agile Release Train) is key to success.
Authentic digital mindset
Critical support for digital transformations is to create the right leadership mindset. Be clear on the strategic purpose, communicate it, set the right (realistic) expectations, support important fundaments (data ownership and quality mindset), and encourage your teams to come up with the path to these goals bottom up innovated. As digital transformations are also about figuring out the right recipe for you - support them to be ok to fail (fast) to figure out the right path.
Digital is at its best if you can change the process to utilize the capabilities of digital tools most efficiently
Live digital as a leader yourself – e.g. use dashboards instead of 120- page powerpoints, use social media to communicate, ask to be educated from modern technologies – all in all, set aside time to change and grow yourself digitally. Setting this example your people will be energized to do the same.
Unleash your data
I am a data democrat I strongly believe that the more people use the data and the more data people use freely available the more great solutions are the result. Most of your clever people are simply hindered to get easily to the data. A simple principle to follow is FAIR data, where data is Findable (cataloged), Accessible (standard tools, easy structure to query, no limits), Interoperable (easy to join, have reference standards, etc), and Reusable (it’s in a data lake and not locked away in use specific databases). Very important also to have the right owners for all the data you want to unleash. They are key to governing global definitions, ensuring standard capture processes, monitoring quality, driving conversion from paper, installation of IOT to capture data even more efficiently.
Governance of (agile) delivery
Also, one reason for failing digital projects is that it is a complex iterative process to explore what is the best process and digital solution in your environment. Digital is at its best if you can change the process to utilize the capabilities of digital tools most efficiently. And the best ideas to improve the process comes when you are working with it already. The dilemma can be solved by running an iterative development and delivery process: Agile. But don’t run just your IT in agile, but the whole approach to digitalization. Mimicking the dynamism of startups with quick financing rounds of MVPs, giving them 8 weeks and a bit of budget to prove the idea helps you to drive a brutal but quick selection of the best-fit ideas (make it fun though like a Sharks Tank event). Perfecting them afterward with a monthly/quarterly release cycle of system functionalities (Scrum or Agile methodology) allows you a lot of “exit points” to sort “value adding” from “struggling to prove” projects.
Humans as part of the process
The value from digitalization is only harvested in operations if you executed an outcome. It’s not enough to analyze, visualize the issue, and make AI recommend an action, if you are unsuccessful in changing the mindset of usage/following a computer it will remain a paper tiger. So make sure the end users are part of developing the new digital way, this is especially a strong approach mixed with the above startup-like selection. That takes away fear, motivates ideas, and creates a process that is human-compatible and with a high likelihood of adaptation.
Wishing you the best of success on your digital journey.
The author is heading digitalization and IT for Supply Chain at Arla, one of the leading dairy companies in Europe – which processes 13.5billion liters of milk in a year – equivalent to 2200 glasses of milk per second drank in the world, 24/7, or 1 full 18wheeler truck of milk products per minute.
