Today’s digital business transformation is a profound change that requires companies to have connectivity across all business functions. Business models, processes, organizational culture, and the customer experience must all be connected to meet the demand of consumers. This interconnectedness creates a complex communication challenge. Areas of businesses that were often siloed from one another are all tasked with delivering clear, meaningful, and consistent experiences. From C-level business administrators to those on the ground delivering direct customer support, all employees are responsible for connecting the dots to overcome internal silos in order to achieve these objectives. There is no way for businesses to successfully stay ahead if all the moving parts in the ecosystem are not connected and the relationships between them are not understood and clearly communicated.
In the coming years, consumers will rarely distinguish between offline and online experiences. The Internet of Things is eliminating this divide between physical and digital as products and services become seamlessly integrated into consumers’ daily lives. What matters most to the consumer is trust, ease of use, meaning, and simplicity in dealing with a business or a brand. These changing expectations are forcing organizations to manage their digital transformation differently.
Prior digital business transformations have been rolled out like other strategic initiatives: plagued with decks of confusing roadmaps and siloed organizational cultures that didn’t engage business units unless the initiative directly impacted their activity. But today, members of organizations who work closest with the customers, from call center reps to retail sales managers, are the ones responsible for ensuring that transformation is successful. That’s why a centralized and siloed strategy development process isn’t working for digital transformation.
Today, the most successful organizations adopting digital transformation strategies are doing more. Their reach is much broader and focuses on engaging a range of employees in the planning and execution of transformation, identifying pain points and the actual needs for individual areas within the ecosystem. This was not a requirement of digital business transformation a few years ago.
Despite some businesses’ successes with digital transformation, we are still seeing senior executive teams fall short in developing a common vision of how the business should change. More specifically the digital transformation vision developed in these companies does not cross internal organizational units, nor is it a shared vision between senior executives and middle managers. Developing and communicating an aligned vision is vital to ensuring that business units, partners, and stakeholders all have a collective view of the future. The transformational shift has to be built upon a coherent strategy that provides the enterprise with a blueprint and common language for achieving the digital vision.
Collaboratively-developed strategy and clear communications can generate tremendous opportunity and effective change if leadership teams develop purposeful and consistent messages. Resources such as plain-language strategy playbooks, end-to-end business process catalogs, new employee or client onboarding guides, and organization-wide training programs are essential for evangelizing change and ensuring a successful transformation. With today’s digital transformation needs, businesses that put more emphasis on continuous communication and being hyper-connected to all aspects of the business will be the ones that succeed.
Steve Frank is a Principal Shareholder and the Director of Business Development at ThoughtForm. He leads ThoughtForm in applying design as a business method to visualize strategies and drive innovation.