How To Mitigate The Hidden Risks Of Digital Transformation

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.

Skills Necessary For Digital Transformation

Technical skills are quite easy to focus on when building a team because they are concrete, easy to measure as well as familiar. With the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic permeating everyone’s lives in some form or another, soft skills are being put to the biggest test as businesses are looking to keep operations on an even keel.

Even without the global pandemic, soft skills are being challenged — especially among companies which are undergoing a process of digital transformation that involves tackling new tasks as well as working with teams throughout the organisation. Without employees who possess the ability to solve problems, get things done as well as work well with others, regulating change at that scale is a very risky task.

In addition, more businesses are fast-tracking their digital transformation owing to the COVID-19 pandemic as employees are working from home and technology companies are making tools free in order  to assist with the transition. Even though many of their customers are working from home, this doesn’t mean that IT professionals have the same ability as they must sort out technical issues in-person and through remote desktop tools. In addition, they must also maintain on-premises servers, and manage many more critical functions.

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