Organisations are looking to grab any type of technology-driven advantage that they can as they adapt to new ways of working, managing employees as well as serving customers. They are making bigger moves towards the cloud, e-commerce, digital supply chains, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), data analytics in addition to other areas which can deliver efficiency and innovation.
At the same time, enterprises are attempting to manage risk. The same digital initiatives which create new opportunities can also lead to risks such as security breaches, regulatory compliance failures, and other setbacks. The result is an ongoing conflict between the need to innovate and the need to mitigate risk.
The Risks Inherent In Digital Transformation
Embarking on a digital transformation process is full of potential risks. According to McKinsey, a total of 70% of digital transformation efforts don’t succeed.
And while there are dozens of reasons why your digital transformation initiative may run into trouble, there are a number of consistent traps that we’ve seen. As with most situations there’s often some pareto optimisation opportunity.
Many organisations have now appointment a Chief Digital Officers. Some may have innovation teams and perhaps even an innovation fund. Even organisations which lack a formal innovation governance model have started holding design sprints, hackathons in addition to other innovation-focused activities.
These are great things to have however often what’s missing is the skill set that is necessary for bringing the ideas which are surfaced into full-scale operations. Unless you’re a team which is experienced at bringing a wide variety of emerging technology and digital transformation to market -from concept to successful user adoption – your teams will struggle. Many of the larger companies have learned this lesson the very hard way.
