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Leading Digital Transformation Tips

Organizations yearn to leverage digital technology and yield the benefits of digital transformation to maximize revenue and ROI through reducing costs (per-transaction), improving customer experience, and advanced analytics. However, adopting digital transformation without efficiently re-engineering business operations and successfully changing corporate culture would be more of a burden that a leverage.

On a survey conducted by Capgemini Digital Transformation Institute, 62% of respondents consider culture to be the number one hurdle to digital transformation. A company’s corporate culture defines how a company works and operates given the collective experience of its employees including their personal values and beliefs as well as the vision and mission truly adopted by its leaders. 

The Capgemini Digital Transformation Institute survey was conducted on 1,700 respondents in 340 organizations from March to April 2017. It spanned five sectors: Automotive, Banking/Insurance, Consumer Products, Retail, and Telecommunications and covered eight countries – the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and Spain. 

Capgemini Digital Transformation Institute and MIT defined digital culture as a set of seven key attributes:

  • Innovation: the prevalence of behaviors that support risk taking, disruptive thinking, and the exploration of new ideas
  • Data-driven Decision-Making: the use of data and analytics to make better business decisions
  • Collaboration: the creation of cross-functional, inter-departmental teams to optimize the enterprise’s skills
  • Open Culture: the extent of partnerships with external networks such as third-party vendors, startups or customers
  • Digital First Mindset: a mindset where digital solutions are the default way forward
  • Agility and Flexibility: the speed and dynamism of decision-making and the ability of the organization to adapt to changing demands and technologies
  • Customer Centricity: the use of digital solutions to expand the customer base, transform the customer experience and co-create new products

One of the most interesting findings in this survey is how much Front-Runners outperform Followers and Slow-Movers on all seven dimensions of digital culture as shown on the above figure. Front-Runners are those who have performed consistently well across the seven dimensions of digital culture and whose leadership has largely succeeded in aligning the wider organization to the desired culture. 

The survey concluded that to create a digital culture, organizations will need to have the right blend of top-down and bottom-up approaches to code a Digital DNA that would engage, empower, and inspire employees to build the culture change together where the key elements to coding a Digital DNA include:

  1.  Deploying change agents and empower employees to drive digital culture
  2.  Designing new digital KPIs focused on behaviors rather than successes or failures
  3.  Making digital culture change tangible
  4.  Using collaboration tools to increase transparency and reach out to employees
  5.  Investing in the digital skills that matter
  6.  Taking a systems thinking approach to culture change
  7.  Setting a clear vision and have visible leadership involvement

 

Source: Capgemini Digital Transformation Institute Survey, Digital Culture; March-April 2017, N = 1700, 340 organizations