THE ROCKY ROAD TO DIGITALIZATION SUCCESS
INTRODUCTION
While digitalization has been on the mind of many executives for a while now, 2020 has brought about an unprecedented and often unanticipated boost to many digital initiatives. From public administrations to the fine arts, from not-for-profits to plain old businesses, almost all organizations felt the pressure to leverage digital technologies when the first wave of CoViD-related lockdown measures hit. And the inevitable economic downturn notwithstanding, a surprising number of organizations found that they managed to employ some digital trick or another to muddle through – often even succeed in this new environment.
If your organization is one of these, you might also have used the temporary respite before the inevitable uptake of infections that is now ongoing to take stock and reflect on a way forward. In doing so, our experiences suggest that you will likely come across a realization that many of the organizations we worked with share: Sustained digitalization is a very rocky road indeed!
Digital transformation needs to be more than just the digitization of products and services.
Thus far, you may have succeeded in safeguarding business continuity and have built up a bit of rapport in terms of reacting to ad-hoc crises using of products and services. Similarly, the implementation of technologies that climb Gartner’s Hype Cycle – from machine learning and IoT platforms to the blockchain – by itself is not digitalization. In our view, more than just fancy technology is required to achieve true and sustainable .
