Every new year, Americans spend around $30 billion on fitness memberships and another $11.15 billion on home exercise equipment, but 90% of them quit their health club within just three months of joining, and much of that equipment will end up for sale on Craigslist.
Just like people share the same New Year’s Resolutions, businesses worldwide are after the same goals: According to IDG Research Services, 87% of enterprises have a digital transformation effort underway, so there’s no sitting on the sidelines; you’re in the race whether you want to be or not.
“Digital transformation” sounds like an expensive, laborious slog. The good news is that most companies are likely closer to succeeding at it than they think. Getting in shape and digital transformation have a lot in common: planning, persistence and patience—with a lot of pragmatism—are the keys to achieving your goals.
Either way, with every old-school competitor raising their game and scores of new digital-first upstarts jumping into the fray, there’s no avoiding digital transformation.
“Digital transformation” sounds like an expensive, laborious slog. The good news is that most companies are likely closer to succeeding at it than they think. Getting in shape and digital transformation have a lot in common: planning, persistence and patience—with a lot of pragmatism—are the keys to achieving your goals.
Either way, with every old-school competitor raising their game and scores of new digital-first upstarts jumping into the fray, there’s no avoiding digital transformation.
“Failing” or just “incomplete?”
Back in 2018, IDC projected companies would spend $6 trillion on digital transformation through 2022; in 2020, Boston Consulting Group collectively rained on that parade, saying only 30% of them would succeed in achieving their transformation goals.
So it came as a surprise to many that when IDC updated its forecast more recently—saying that spending will increase to $10 trillion through 2025—but KPMG sent in the clouds, finding that the majority of American businesses “have not seen an increase in performance or profitability from digital transformation investments.”
It might seem like we’re spending a lot of money to deliver less-than-desired outcomes and that we’re not making much progress. Are we heading backward? That’s an obvious question. But the less-obvious questions are:
1. Do you feel like you are succeeding in places?
2. How are you measuring success?
3. When is it “over,” and you get to declare victory?
When you are in a new fitness regimen, have you “failed” because you’ve only lost 10 pounds of your 20-pound goal? Of course not. You celebrate your progress, and you keep working at it. In a digital transformation, each company’s goals and starting points are unique to their particular circumstances. As a result, based on the clients I work with daily, there are many ways to measure progress. For example:
• Actual Revenue Vs. Planned Revenue.
• Return-On-Decisions/ROI Per Dollar Spent.
• Greater Self-Sufficiency Of Business Users.
• Improvement In On-Time Performance.
• Faster Application Deployment.
• Faster Go-Lives.
• Faster Creation Of Offers.
• Faster Approval Rates.
• Faster Development Modifications.
• Applications Processed/Day.
• Gain In Automated Approvals.
• Decline In Credit Defaults.
• Reduction In Development Costs.
All those small victories add up.
All of these are laudable goals and legitimate KPIs. But as you continue to press forward, they add up—and have a force-multiplying effect. The trick is to keep pushing. Remember: planning, persistence, patience and pragmatism; together, the combined synergy will help your company deliver results.
For example, I have seen digital transformation efforts help a digital bank onboard almost all of its customers within four minutes and without manual intervention. I have also seen a massive increase in efficiency by a major bank.
In my experience, the companies that are succeeding in digital transformation are the ones that are relentless in their experimentation and implementation. They are, as author Jim Collins described in the book Good to Great, believers in the “flywheel concept.”
Collins could be describing digital transformation when he writes, “No matter how dramatic the end result, good-to-great transformations never happen in one fell swoop. In building a great company or social sector enterprise, there is no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.”
So, if you are worried that your digital transformation isn’t where you want it to be—keep pushing.
In the context of the Industrial Revolution, applying technology to operating mechanisms in each organization is extremely necessary, and is also an inevitable trend to minimize workload while still ensuring efficiency and enhance its competitive position in the market. Furthermore, applying management software into a business will also help build an organization with a clear system, promoting consistency, transparency and accuracy. Tasken eOffice, researched and built by Opus Solution – a business consultant in Vietnam – is an internal work management system as well as the management of automated, online, user-friendly approval processes, allowing businesses to operate more effectively on the path of digital transformation.
Forbes
