How to achieve successful business transformation
What should be our main focus? This is a question I frequently hear from organizations that see successful business transformation as key to thrive during these times of rapid digital change. They want to transform to reap the benefits of a digitalised business, yet worry about the inevitable stumbling blocks they will face. For a successful transformation, it may seem logical to focus on technology and innovation. The crucial differentiator between failure and success in a business transformation, though, is great leadership.
What does great leadership entail? During a business transformation, my experience is that it boils down to these essentials that will position your business for success.
- Make sure everyone understands technology and its benefits
First of all, your duty as a leader is to make sure the importance of digital technology and its benefits to the company are clear to everyone. Use real life examples to explain it and focus on getting everyone to embrace digital change. As part of this process, you should review whether your business has the required key competencies to lead and deliver on technology change – a rich combination of sound business knowledge, digital technology, and proven leadership during change. Use external review and skills assessment to highlight any need to strengthen these areas in a traditional industrial setting. It is critical that all employees get the support and training they need to succeed in the digital age.
- Prioritise good initiatives and stop low-value innovations
To achieve the best results and avoid wasting resources, you need successful change management. This means correctly prioritising the right initiatives and stopping innovations that do not deliver the expected value. There are many different approaches, but whichever you choose, make sure it allows good ideas to be prioritised and tested. The focus should always be on delivering value and minimising waste, and my preference is to follow the lean/agile approach.
- Make collaboration a priority
Both internal and external collaboration is critical. Internally, your management team needs to collaborate with your IT team to find the right solutions and decide on the best way to get them. Externally, you need to collaborate with a solid technology partner that has proven experience in areas such as artificial intelligence, autonomy, and cybersecurity. This will give you a wider perspective of what is possible today and allow you to collaborate around technology and key business challenges. Take into consideration that a cloud-enabled industrial partner can help you achieve your technology roadmap with minimum internal development efforts and help show you how other actors and industries are benefiting from digital opportunities.
- Move towards data-driven decisions
Digitalisation and business transformation must be a part of your company strategy, and it must be driven by your management. One of the key advantages of digital technology is that it enables you to use analytical decision support in your planning. Focus on combining this with your business expertise to move towards data-driven decisions. This will enable you to identify areas of high potential for improvement, utilizing your branch knowledge to steer a digital roadmap that will achieve the expected benefits. In turn, this will ensure that you are taking steps to verify what data you have today, the level of the data quality, and whether you need to change process or technology platform in order to capture the right data. This data will serve as the raw material for making decision-support solutions in the future.
If you focus on these things, you are well on your way to tuning your organisation towards successful business transformation.
This is Fathom Partner Content from Kongsberg
