What’s Hindering Your Company’s Digital Transformation?
In order for companies to maximize the value of their digital investments, it is crucial to acknowledge the human component in the challenges of tech adoption in the planning stages.
Digital innovation has ensured the rapid dissemination of new technologies into nearly every industry and company. However, the race to facilitate a company-wide digital transformation puts organizations at the risk of wasting an average of $28 million on rushed, ill-thought-out digital projects.
A big contributing factor to this wasted investment is that while companies believe the digital talent gap is widening, they don’t necessarily know how to address said gap within their digital transformation efforts. In order for companies to maximize the value of their digital investments, it is crucial to acknowledge the challenges that arise from the human component of tech adoption, while also prioritizing learning objectives and educational resources for employees to navigate the culture change that comes with innovation.
A Widening Gap
Despite the knowledge of a widening digital talent gap across industries, leadership is failing to adequately address the gap and, in turn, facilitate smoother digital transformations. Companies tend to invest in new technologies for an intended benefit, without properly articulating the total value to their users. For example, with typical collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams, Sharepoint, and OneDrive, an employee may have a very basic grasp on using certain functions of the software to carry out specific, necessary processes—yet lack a deeper understanding of the power of the tool, and how it facilitates productivity on an individual, team, and organizational level. It’s critical for management to communicate these higher level value propositions to their teams so that every employee feels connected to and responsible for, the ultimate success of the business.
The Human Element
When looking at the evolution of digital transformation and migration projects, it is clear that the definition has changed. Traditionally, the digital transformation was synonymous with IT. In recent years, however, the definition has matured, evolved, and expanded. Digital transformation varies from organization to organization to help companies innovate, grow, and achieve a competitive edge. Still, this new definition of transformation neglects to mention the cultural shift that should precede every successful transformation.
Companies have knelt to the growing pressure for businesses to ride the trend of digitization, specifically the turn to a cloud-first digital world which has proliferated industries today. However, this trend often fails to anticipate the sheer amount of effort and time involved in the task of a migration. This process is not instantaneous—rather, it’s an ongoing, complete change in technology and how it’s used. Success in digital transformation depends on many factors, but the primary component rests on the employees within that organization and their ability to react positively to the change.
Therefore, in the scenario where a project is rushed for the sake of adopting technologies and not communicated properly, that organization’s employees then don’t understand why the migration is happening, why it’s necessary, or what the intended impact of the transformation will be. Without the established understanding of how a new software tool will make their jobs easier, they fail to see the value proposition and, in turn, don’t make the effort to properly utilize it.
More than communicating the value of adoption to their employees, leadership needs to be prepared to grapple with the challenge of generational differences that fuel the tech learning gap. Millennials currently represent around 40 percent of the workforce, however, today’s company may have five different generations under one roof. Businesses must find it necessary to strike a balance in suiting the learning needs of those who’ve grown up alongside technology with those that aren’t quite as intuitive.
The Metrics of Success
When establishing the metrics of success in a digital transformation project, the benchmarks of adoption and consumption are absolutely critical to the task. Moreover, it’s crucial to clarify what each of these metrics actually mean. The metric of adoption should not be measured by number of users on software platforms or desktop applications, as this does not account for the dynamics of how the employees are actually utilizing those tools. It is crucial to have measures in place to help leadership define success based upon who within the company is a part of the adoption, how they’re using it, and how often.
Customized Learning
Technology adoption is regularly focused on achieving organizational goals. For any change to be effective, and to obtain employee buy-in, an organization must work to appeal to the individual goals of employees and adapt to different learning styles to help facilitate adoption. There must be strategies in place to inspire employees to embrace this new way of working, networking, and collaborating.
**Leadership must recognize that it’s the people of an organization that drive transformation and, ultimately, make it successful.** Any digital project approach must be holistic, address cultural change, and be informed by the technology efficiency of each part of the personas within a company. As a company goes through a transformation, they should consult with their technology adoption partner to gain an understanding of how the applications work together and, most importantly, how the benefits—both on an individual level and company-wide—can inform the strategy. A one-size-fits-all strategy is not effective. The strategy must be based on actual assessments of the employees’ proficiency levels and what their job responsibilities are. If those variables are considered, employees are more likely to meet objectives and apply the knowledge immediately. Technology adoption that begins right away makes long-term adoption more likely.
Management should provide a range of learning development solutions to employees so that learning styles, generational differences, and specific benefits are accounted for as a part of a holistic approach.
The growth of an organization is more likely when they have access to a variety of solutions to get employees to the optimal level of efficiency with self-help tools and live support. Providing different types of services with a customized learning program that allows the employee to focus on what they want and what they believe is important, and that approach will get organizations to optimal proficiency.
