Transformation Phase

The first step for any business transformation process is to determine the general vision and the key objectives of this effort. What the company wants to achieve at the end? How digital transformation and adoption of new technologies and new business logic should affect its business transactions? The next step is to set up a detailed plan and roadmap that operationalize it on specific actions in specific time. In the transformation phase, you have to design the overall shape of your digital transformation journey and to put the cornerstones. This section will help you to understand how to plan the right goals for your company and how to create a shared vision for your company’s digital transformation.

Any company transformation results in different changes affecting people in the organisation. Winning the digital transformation journey, strategic thinking and deep involvement of all employees is required. Digitisation process will bring new leaders on board, jobs descriptions will change, new skills and capabilities will be required, and people will be uncertain.

All transformation processes provoke people's fear and lead to resistance, opposition, open or hidden counteractions. Dealing with these issues on a reactive, case-by-case basis puts speed, morale and results at risk. Therefore a disciplined approach to change management must be one of the main pillars of any transformation approach. Change management approach should be based on facts and demands data collection and analysis, planning, and implementation discipline. It should be fully integrated into program design and decision-making, both informing and enabling strategic direction. It should be based on a realistic assessment of the organisation's history, readiness, and people's capacity to change. Further, there should be adopted both formal and informal change management models, beginning with the leadership team and then engaging with key stakeholders and leaders, but adapted often as change moves through the organisation. The change management programme should link multiple change initiatives together.

In digital transformation not only technologies, strategies or business models are changing. In connection with the fast changing digitally influenced economic and social environment processes, products, services and especially customer requirements evolve which also require a new way of working. The classical waterfall management process is not the most appropriate to address the challenges but more and more agile, flexible, user/customer oriented working methods need to be implemented in our working environment to ensure to quickly react on the new expectations and new framework conditions. These new methods have a big impact on the company’s culture and on the employees’ as well as the management’s attitude.

In this section, you will learn how to assess your digital transformation journey and how to explore its lessons’ learned. In order to keep good track of your progress you have to gain a good understanding of the real experiences and outcomes for your business. The most important factor for success is to be ready to improve, refine and adapt your strategy and actions to the new challenges that come on your way.