How ready are you for digital transformation?

The large businesses we work with have customers with incredibly high expectations of digital experiences. They have employees – including leaders – with very different opinions on transformation objectives, strategies and implementation, pulling the business in different directions.

And they're typically built on an incredibly complex mix of IT-enabled processes. I like to recount the example I once heard of a bank back in the early 2000s. They had a server farm running applications critical to the customer experience, and there was one server that – even after investigation – was a mystery. No one knew what it was for, but they were too scared to touch it in case it had an impact further down the line. So they just left it, idly running in the background.

It's a story that always makes me chuckle, and you could argue that they did the sensible thing. But I think it's indicative of what often happens when companies try to move from the complexity of where they are today, to where they need to be. They give up, and retreat to an "if it ain’t broke, why fix it?" mentality. But that won't cut it when the world around you is transforming.

If your business has no intention of being left behind, you'll recognize that digital transformation is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have for organizations looking to thrive beyond the pandemic. McKinsey agrees. A recent report found that "At the organizations that experimented with new digital technologies during the crisis, and among those that invested more capital expenditures in digital technology than their peers did, executives are twice as likely to report outsized revenue growth than executives at other companies."

So how do you step up to the digital transformation challenge and opportunity – without becoming one of the failures? Ultimately, there's no getting around the fact that transformation is tied to human qualities and behavior that are critical to building successful collaboration and change management. The leadership, ambition, teamwork and emotional intelligence of your people will form the bedrock of your transformation strategy. But beyond putting in place the right people and culture from top to bottom, what will make the difference between success and failure?

Perhaps it's because of our focus on content supply chain transformation, but when we look at the businesses that are successful with transformation, we see organizations that build their strategies firmly around their customers and the cultures and societies in which they exist.

It's not that an internally focused drive to improve operations isn't an important transformational goal, but if internal transformation isn't ultimately backed by an outwardly-directed ambition to provide meaningful new experiences and interactions for customers, then it may well be a kind of acceptance of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

To create and deliver on a customer-focused strategy and plan, you need to understand the drivers for transformation that intersect with the needs and expectations of your customers. To this end, throughout 2021 we'll be publishing insights on:

Across these trends, we see three key drivers of transformation – reflecting what customers expect from their interactions with your business and the kind of organization you need to be: