Reasons for Digital Transformations Failure

 Digital transformations fail for many reasons, but most issues can be linked back to one of three things: people, communication, and measurement.

• People

People can make or break your digital transformation. Remember: culture is both a top driver of digital transformation and one of the six pillars of successful ones. If you don’t put enough focus on people and culture, your initiative is bound to fail.

Sixteen of McKinsey’s 21 keys to success in digital transformation involve people.

• Poor Communication

Announcing a digital transformation initiative is not the same as communicating with your team about it. Often, leadership simply mandates changes without taking the time to explain the why and how. If you don’t provide specific and actionable guidance before, during, and even after a transformation, your initiative won’t make it very far.

• Lack of Measurement

You can’t have a successful digital transformation if you failed to define what success means to you. Companies sometimes assume they can monitor success based on the key performance metrics (KPIs) they’ve already established for their business. But if you’re changing the way you do business, you’ll need to set additional KPIs to monitor the effects.

Digital Transformation Strategy

 A digital transformation strategy is a plan of action for introducing, analyzing, and driving a digital transformation initiative forward. Your strategy will define what business goals you aim to achieve through digital transformation.

An effective digital transformation strategy will create a framework for you to follow throughout this ever-evolving process. But before you begin, it’s important to know what you hope to achieve so you can designate KPIs to track along the way.

For example, if you are migrating users from Salesforce Classic to Lightning, your high-level metrics for measuring adoption would be log-in rates, usage, data quality, and business performance.

In this case, you might drill down further and monitor metrics such as:

• Monthly sales volumes
• Opportunities created
• Sales productivity (e.g., time saved, volume of sales activity per rep)
• User log-in rates
• Prospect account with key fields populated

 

A well-thought-out strategy will also address how the transformation will affect your customers and your employees. Start internally by designating change leaders who will publicly support your transformation. Putting trusted change leaders in charge of announcing and supporting the transformation will help generate momentum. Regularly soliciting feedback from anyone affected by the change will also help keep the momentum going.

Don’t forget to include your team’s accomplishments as part of your progress tracking. Whether you’re pointing out a quantitative achievement, e.g., a 10% increase in user log-in rates, or qualitative, e.g., Beth created a Slack group to answer questions about the transformation – celebrating milestones throughout the process is important.

Customers and employees alike will turn to the people initiating the transformation to gain the knowledge they need to be successful. It’s up to you to provide the necessary tools.

Those tools may come in many forms, but if you’re making a digital transformation, chances are, there are digital resources that could support your transition. Will you use e-learning tools for training? Could videos allow users to learn at their own pace? Keep in mind that transformations are an evolution, so leveraging tools that can adapt quickly, like digital adoption platforms, could save you time and effort down the line.