5 Barriers to Digital Transformation

You may be struggling to drive some sort of change, innovation, or digital transformation within your organization right now.

Why is it so hard? And what's the secret to getting big companies to transform successfully? 

There are five main barriers that large enterprises face when trying to innovate: change resistance, knowledge of customers, risk management, organizational agility and transformation vision.

Change resistance Change is uncomfortable. Even if a change sets us up for a great future, most people won't warm up to it quickly. To successfully drive change within an organization, create a burning platform for change so that failing to change is more painful than the change itself. Offer a compelling vision of the future once the change is complete, give people the confidence of success, and provide the opportunity to help create the change (instead of falling victim to it).

Knowledge of customersYou may think you have the answers, but how well do you actually know your customers? To incorporate your customers' voice into your product development, you can use these five tactics:

• Humility: Truthfully, we don't even know ourselves that well, so it's important to recognize that understanding someone else well enough to predict future behavior is no small feat.
• Specificity: Figure out exactly what you need to know about your current or potential users that would make a difference to your product development. Use questions like: "What do you they like or not like about your product?" and "What are their unmet needs?"
• Involvement: Get your whole team involved in customer research to allow the entire development process to include an understanding of the customers’ world and their current reality.
• Iteration: One round of user testing is not enough -- You need to continually study your customers to see how they’re reacting to your product and how their needs are changing.
• 4D listening: Try to see past the surface of what your customers are saying to what they’re truly asking of you. Your customers may not be able to envision the more practical solutions that your product team conceives.

Risk management Is it risky to transform your enterprise? Of course! The key to success is creating the expectation that innovation efforts are an iterative process. Successful innovation requires experiments, learning, persistence and, most importantly, the willingness to fail. Once you have alignment around the idea that some level of risk is necessary and appropriate, you can gain confidence from enterprise funders by envisioning the different types of risks your efforts might face and develop remediation strategies to combat those risks.

Organizational Agility As quickly as you can adapt, the digital world changes. Organizational agility is key to keeping up in the digital arena. There are five specific types of agility that are important for success in digital: Sensing: This means knowing what's going on around you so you can be aware of what actions might be required. How are customers, competitors and industry regulations changing, and what new technology exists that could impact your digital experiences?

• Technology: Moving quickly from idea to live solution is important in supporting and growing your digital experience. Does your enterprise have technology stacks that are adaptable and easily maintained? Are your content and presentation capabilities accessible to your product owners and content managers?
• Decision-making: Capital approval processes that take months to reach a final decision don't work with the speed of digital. The people running your innovation projects need the autonomy and authority to make decisions on the ground-level so that they happen with speed necessary to keep up with the digital world.
• Strategy shifts: Embrace and expect that your innovation projects will go through a process of trial-and-error on their way to the kind of digital transformation success that you're seeking.
• Teaming: Despite a persistent myth, there is no one structure in which all digital work can be done by a single team of people operating under a single executive. The key to teaming agility is creating a culture with alignment across divisional silos, so that mobilization of the right people happens quickly and efficiently.

Transformation vision Many organizations have a basic vision for growth: Optimize what already exists or expand upon current offerings. But to create a true transformation vision, one that encompasses your entire organization, you need to determine how the world is changing and how that will affect your customers' needs. Only then can you determine what new products and services you can bring to market and the different channels you'll need to deliver on them. You may even decide that the imminent changes will shift your focus to an entirely new set of customers! To be successful in the long-run, think regarding transformation time so that you can get a few steps ahead.