Creating an actionable vision and allocating sufficient change mandate
In today's world businesses and organizations are under heavy pressure to adapt to the demands coming from digitalization. IT is not an internal support function anymore but rather a crucial, if not the most crucial, part of making business in the digital era. This puts tremendous pressure on presently and historically non IT centric organizations, organizations where IT initself is not core business.
Most digital transformation initiatives fail, or are at least progressing very slowly, due to organizational barriers. These barriers are challenging as organizations and employees react differently to change. Reorganizing and making fundamental transformations puts enormous pressure on employees and challenges the current structure and established ways of working.
Some employees (including management), will feel threatened and fear a loss of influence, power, resources, or even the loss of a job. We also think this aligns with our reluctance to change if we don’t personally see benefits with the change “you know what you have but you do not know what you are going to get”.
To be able to penetrate the current organization, make a fundamental transformation of your business and get staff onboard you need two things above all:
- You need a communicated, commonly agreed vision on where you are going,
- Mandate for reorganizing and achieving the required digital transformation.
However to achieve these two things you also need to consider the underlying factors that currently are preventing you and your organization from establishing these two seemingly simple goals. As experts on supporting digital transformation, IT and integration we constantly meet all, or some, of the following states that prevents organizations to establish a proper digital vision and change mandate:
- An unclear or at least un-communicated company vision of the destination for the digitalization journey. What will our business look like in the digital era? This should be a powerful tool in aligning people and create confidence in participating and contributing to the journey, even if it means some degree of struggle and uncertainty during the journey
- Top management leaders and their leadership style, protecting current power structure, usually based on a non-digital based core business model, risk of losing face by exposing low IT competency, and other prestige based or “face saving” reasons
- Current organizational setup and (lack of true) agility, everyone embraces change as long as it does not affect themselves
- Middle managers lack of IT competence and the lack of (face saving) competence enhancement activities
- Lack of rewards and incentives
- Unclear measurement systems
- The lack of an organizationally penetrating true learning culture
When we are asked for assistance we always start with identifying an actionable vision, if not already present we assist in creating one. We believe that you should not start a journey if you do not know where you are going. This sounds astoundingly obvious but we see this being done over and over again.
"To get your ducks in a row the ducks needs to know where they are going."
To achieve a proper change mandate we assist our customers in putting people first. We recommend that you run your change management programs with more people‐centric approaches. To successfully lead any organization through major transformation, it is crucial for its management to balance both the technology shift as well as the organizational and human capital within.
We see the organizational barriers to digital transformation as the bigger challenge as it is usually neglected in favor of the technology shift in itself as that is an easier but in itself insufficient solution.
“The person/organizational change must follow the technology change”
