Senior management is often one of the biggest barriers to achieving digital transformation, especially in mid-sized and large organizations. Over the years, I have come to discover that the motion forward is not about a lack of talent or a lack of technical skills. In fact, the barriers are not due to a technology problem or even a financial budget issue. Ultimately, the real problem for any company to adopt and immerse digital transformation is senior management.
I have not come to this conclusion lightly; it is an observation derived from working in multiple roles for some large software and technology companies over the last 15. I have also shared my experiences with thousands of colleagues within data science and have further researched this topic.
Since 2010 all the ‘Big 4’ consulting companies have been issuing a plethora of reports and white papers talking about the cultural change required and the multiple obstacles to face in order to enter at the digital economy for any organization. Those consulting giants also talk about the benefits, opportunities and the ‘promised land’ of being a data-driven company.
Back in 2015, one of the Big 4 consulting companies published a report that indicates the biggest challenges for digital transformation, with the top three challenges identified as:
- Lack of training and employee engagement
- Lack of dedicated funding to digital transformation
- Misalignment of organization short-term goals versus long-term goals
Delving into the subject matter further, I discovered a newer report from the same company that was published in February 2022, where the top three challenges shifted and became:
- Changing company culture
- Going beyond ‘campaign mentality’
- Cooperation between departments and breaking data-silos
The newer report reveals that challenges related to human resources are still relevant, if not more significant. The challenge of funding seems to have fallen from being one of the most critical challenges.
It has been my experience that most new hires and others entering new professional roles are usually saddled with performing repetitive, long, boring, and tedious tasks. Most of which can be easily automated. However, I have observed that most newcomers will attempt to change those processes by digitally transforming them, yet these changes are not adopted by the organization and those staffers are forced to keep doing the same thing as before because “this is how it has been done”.
With that in mind, let me clue you in to another metric that never seems to appear on any type of management report – the number of employees in your organization actively looking for another job. Simply put, when an employee is prevented from implementing any process improvement by discouraging factors, such as the incompetency or lack of knowledge of manager/s, the employee may seek another opportunity where they can evolve with the world and the technology.
What’s more, there is ‘global concern’ about the lack of talent available to fill open positions for data professionals. Jobs that include data analysts, business intelligence, data scientists, data engineers, and so on. For more information take a look at my previous article ‘Where do businesses find data scientists?’.
Ultimately, it is up to you, the CxO to properly train all your senior managers, directors, and executives on the concepts of digital transformation. And, when I say train them, I mean executing digital transformation projects; not just going to a weekend seminar or attending an executive master class about data science or artificial intelligence.
Senior managers and directors must learn about the complexities and challenges of performing automated analysis, pulling data from a data base or how to apply machine learning to their day-to-day data. They also need to learn about ‘polluted data’ and what it takes to clean and stage data for analysis. Once they understand those key elements, they will be ready to take actions and make informed decisions.
A resonating statement that exemplifies the challenges ahead is: “Digital Transformation is Cultural Change. So, if there is no cultural change then there will be no digital transformation.”
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