Technology-fuelled change is missing something...
By Hamilton Jones | Chief Digital Officer
Only 7% of digital transformation projects make market impact*. Change is hard, so what’s missing?
I’ve spent most of my career helping organisations and people understand the impact of technology and then navigate a path to gaining benefit from it for themselves and their customers.
Like everyone who’s worked in this space, I’ve seen many change and transformation approaches come and go. These approaches seem to always be driven by an understandable need for us to answer tactically-focused questions, like:
Are our efforts to create and improve customer experiences really responding to their needs?
Are we evolving our digital presence so we can respond dynamically to consumer needs and remove friction?
Will the emergence of Voice drive new opportunities for us to improve how we connect to customers?
Could we use AI to capture more timely and effective insight from our customer data?
Have we found a way to rationalise our technology so we’re more efficient?
Answering these questions will send you down one a few different paths, or ‘vectors’, for your solution. I’ve shared a few of the most common vectors in the diagram below. While these vectors have evolved over time and this list isn’t exhaustive, I do feel they don’t fully address some of the key challenges that get in the way of successful change. Something is missing.
Vectors for technology-led change
Before I share what I believe is missing, I’d like to set the scene with an example…
Recently, the Queensland State Government put a hold on all IT investment because of a high failure rate for projects until the drivers of these failures could be identified. The Auditor-General was brought in to complete a review of the government’s IT programmes (report here).
In those projects that delivered successfully and drove adopted change, the Auditor General identified five key factors that supported this success:
Senior leaders led and challenged projects the whole way through
There was clear alignment of the project to business outcomes
Internal and external teams work towards the same goals
Capability and capacity were understood and accommodated
Evidence and lessons were captured and acted on
Notice how none of these success factors relies on technology, design or data as part of the solution. Rather, having an understanding of the complexity of organisational context, the environment in which the change needs to happen, is what made the difference between a project realising benefits or not.
What we miss in technology-fuelled change right now–in part or whole–is recognising that organisations are both complicated and complex. It simply can’t be ignored.
The complexity comes when you put many people together and ask them to perform in a model that defines its success in ways that may not suit the change the technology can bring.
Understanding technology and its impact starts with understanding the context into which we deploy it. We cannot rely on simply delivering the change successfully. If we want to stick the landing too, we need to look at the organisational experience and how it drives leadership support, and alignment and adoption of the change by people.
Context isn’t something we should gloss over. It is crucial in us correctly selecting and delivering the right technology and supporting its adoption in the right way.
Successful technology change isn’t about bloated governance, laboured discovery or finding the perfect technology solution to your needs. There is a considered and powerful way to ensure our change projects are identified, enabled and adopted by understanding their place in the organisation we want to change. Understanding complexity doesn’t remove it (and it shouldn’t), but it can identify and address the complications reducing risk in technology-fuelled change that are difficult to land.
STCK is a new kind of consultancy that is focused on making change stick, with a nimble team of designers, strategists, technologists, change managers and adoption specialists. We offer the market a fresh way to look at solving the problems organisations face in making change become a living, integral part of the business and help ensure it is sustainable, profitable and purposeful.
*Digital Business Transformation: An Australian Perspective — Gartner 2018 report Jenny Beresford n90 Australian Businesses