Are you Digital Ready?

Question is how many of these initiatives that have been successful and led to the desired effect? Studies indicates that the majority of digital transformation projects fail to meet their objectives and that something is missing for organisations to reach their full digital capabilities.

This is why we decided to gather our experiences and ideas on how to successfully drive digital transformation (or rather digital innovation projects that we prefer to call them) projects in a model that we simply named ”Digital Ready”.

In an article published by Forbes, the writer claims that 84% of digital transformation projects fail.

Some of the common reasons for failure in digital transformation projects are :

• lack of alignment around business outcome

• lack of alignment around business priorities 

• lack of organisational enablement

• it takes to long to realize value

In "The second wave of digital transformation" a report published by Radar Ecosystems, the analyst points out that even though lots of investments have been pouring into IT tooling and platforms, many organisations still struggle with their digital transformation initiatives.

The analysis is that not only IT tooling and platforms are required to digitally transform – you also need to modify and update your organisation and its culture to be really digitally ready. The above and our own experiences from working with customers inspired us in the making of the Digital Ready model. 

In addition to this we decided to skip talking about digital transformation and move on to talk about digital innovation instead. Firstly we did this to emphasize what we believe that organisations really want to achieve with their digital initiatives and secondly we wanted to inject new energy in the discussion and move away from the digital transformation discussion.

With a focus on digital innovation, we want to set sight on the desired outcome of these initiatives and if executed the right way it will bring digital and organisational transformation along. 

The Digital Ready model consists of four perspectives that we believe are important to cover when working for digital innovation. These are :

1. Vision

The vision sets the target and ”the why” for your initiative. If your digital initiative is not set out to support a digital vision, you will be off in the wrong direction already from the start. This is why you need to make sure that your digital innovation initiative/program is designed to support the corporate digital vision.

2. Change Driver

This is how you define ”the how” of your initiative. Important things to take into consideration here are to plan for the implementation. Make sure to have a mandate for change, identify a change leader, how to communicate and cater for employee involvement in different ways.

3. Digital capabilities

This part of the Digital Ready model covers ”the what” of your program. Which digital capabilities will this initiative bring to the organisation, which digital assets will be unlocked/made available, how will you support the organisation in using them and how will you analyze their usage?

4. Business capabilities

This perspective is part of the Digital Ready model to put focus on the business change that will be required to gain the intended benefits of the program and make the initiative work towards the established vision. Questions that are covered are how to enable ”self service”, impact on budgets and internal financing of projects and initiatives, impact on affected parties and how to measure change and results.

Of course no change program or initiative like this would stand a chance without the proper management backing, This is why management backing also is an integral part of each of the above steps and also covered by our Digital Ready model.

For each of the perspectives, we will point out what kind of management backing we believe is required to be successful with your digital innovation initiative.

For those of you who are uncertain where in the process you are and if you are successful or not, we have also included a Digital Ready Maturity analysis to the package. With this tool we will help you analyse where you are today and what areas that might need further work to make your strategy successful.