为什么数字化转型会失败，以下为数字化转型失败的八大原因：
一、平台分散化管理
哈克特集团(Hackett Group)负责人兼数字化转型负责人Michael Spires说，当2020年3月新冠病毒来临时，人们看到了挑战，并基于现状提出了解决方案来应对。但是他们只是采取了我们遇到了危机，我们采取了应对措施”的态度，并没有解决根本的技术问题，也没有解决如何完成工作这个底层逻辑的问题。Hackett的研究发现，IT虽然提供了远程工作的能力，首席信息官们也提高了他们在组织中的地位，但这是以在“”未集成的平台”上构建为代价的。
Spires表示如果IT部门使用的底层技术是未集成的，或者由于并购带来的组织增长，IT部门没有将不同的技术集成到一个平台上，就可能会出现这种情况。在危机期间投入资源来解决问题是一回事，但这是不可持续的。“你可以用6到18个月的时间来应对COVID所带来的市场挑战，但这并没有建立一个长期的、转型的技术平台，也不一定会改变你与利益相关者会面的方式。而由于这些做法，许多IT领导者现在也面临平台分散化、难管理的状况。
二、缺乏清晰的愿景和战略
麻省理工学院斯隆信息系统研究中心(CISR)主任、首席研究科学家Stephanie Woerner说，当组织选择进行工业化类型的转型时，这首先涉及升级技术骨干。一个组织的运营骨干将取决于它是哪种公司。这可能意味着是要一个SAP系统或者是一个核心银行平台。Woerner表示，如果你自己也不清楚数字化究竟要给公司带来什么改变，公司的数字化转型会变得非常困难。公司经常忘记数字化转型实际上是同时做两件事：第一是将你的主干数字化，第二是通过重用组件或流程实现自动化和简化，即在数字化过程中既要重视运营骨干的投入，也要关注客户的需求。
CISR的研究表明，当企业现在进行自我转型时，“不仅仅是关于运营骨干的培育，同时也是为了取悦客户。”
Baptist Health South Florida高级副总裁兼首席数字官和信息官Tony Ambrozie表示，如果缺乏清晰的愿景和战略”，数字计划就会失败。但即使有伟大的愿景、战略和董事会的支持，如果没有提前为数字化转型做计划，也可能发生故障。”计划可能没用，但计划是无价的，”Ambrozie说，除了分配专用资源外，“严格的执行也是无可替代的”。
三、没有从客户角度出发进行数字化
Woerner表示，如果你还没有弄清楚如何让客户适应你的新业务方式，数字化转型也可能会失败。例如，“数字银行非常令人兴奋，但如果你还不知道如何让你的客户使用这种新银行，你就会陷入两个业务部门做同一件事的困境，”这意味着一个业务部门仍然必须亲自进行交易，而另一个业务部门已经转移到网上银行。她表示，“如果你因为不知道如何将客户转移到网上银行，而无法将他们转移到网上银行，而且客户会有很多抵制……那就是失败。”
CISR已经看到这种情况发生在银行身上，尤其是银行——他们有很好的想法来改变自己，“然后他们意识到，我们忘记了客户，”Woerner说，就像你通常会为你的员工进行大量的培训一样，你几乎也必须为你的客户提供组织培训。这可以通过交流的形式来实现。
Ambrozie认为，数字化转型的主要目的是更好地为客户服务，然后是为组织及其员工服务。
四、数字化只停留在中高层，没有深入基层
Legal & General America保险部门IT和转型高级副总裁Raju Seetharaman表示，同样，虽然数字转型通常面临架构和技术解决方案方面的挑战，但文化变革是最大的挑战。
“利益相关者已经习惯了他们的工作方式，存在着变革阻力，你必须应对这种变革，”西塔拉曼说。“这是让他们踏上一段旅程”，并弄清楚如何管理变化。他建议让员工尽早发布正在改造的产品。他说，如果是大的平台变化，那就给他们一个最小可行的产品或演示，这样他们就可以提供反馈，感觉自己是旅程的一部分。如果涉众不喜欢某些东西，IT也应该提供快速的改进。否则，产品可能注定会失败。
Woerner对此表示赞同，她说，在她的研究中，大多数失败都发生在首席信息官和其他领导者没有让每个人都参与进来，也没有通过开展培训项目来应对数字化带来的文化变革。“这些努力大多不会很成功，因为要改变一种文化，你必须改变你的习惯——这就是改变人们的工作方式。”“因此，我们建议人们真正致力于那些新的工作方式，比如确保(员工)非常擅长敏捷，并将数据引入流程”，而不是创造假设。
五、缺乏足够的资金和商业头脑
MorganFranklin Consulting首席信息官Franzuha Byrd表示，缺乏足够的资金和商业头脑是数字项目失败的另一个必然原因。
Byrd 说:“技术领导者擅长实施技术，但要求他们从财务角度阐述数字转型项目的价值，而大多数人都达不到要求。我经常遇到不切实际的期望。如果一个技术领导者没有强大的商业背景，指望他能与预期的业务结果高度一致是不切实际的。”
Ambrozie说，重要的是，这些计划要有专门的多年预算和承诺，以支持它们度过好年景和坏年景。他说:“组织，尤其是首席财务官，必须清楚地了解投资回报——它们将如何表现出来，以及何时表现出来。”因此，不要期望投资回报会立即出现。“否则，就有可能把一开始就视为失败，而不是长期成功的开始。”
六、没有考虑数字化转型工作到底需要什么
Spires说，当组织考虑他们需要的工具来推动数字化的采用和技术的实现时，许多组织都没有后退一步，首先考虑组织需要什么。他说，技术组织的一部分可能会抓住一个工具，并决定它需要在其他地方使用，但这导致在采用公共工具集方面缺乏有意义的协调。
Spires说:“这样你在多个工具上的专业知识就会断裂。“决策是在仓促中做出的”，没有考虑转型工作需要什么。他说，这导致“不考虑大局，而是从战术上考虑，在危机中考虑，在当下考虑”。“我们仍然看到很多竖井……(IT)没有进行全面管理。这导致了工具的泛滥和通用工具的缺乏。”
Spires说，考虑到目前IT人员的短缺，添加的工具越多，你就越“只会重复问题，而不是通过正确的工具来解决问题”。
七、数字化转型是一把手工程
全国会计和金融服务公司the Bonadio Group的首席信息官John Roman表示，大多数技术举措在没有高层支持的情况下都会失败，数字转型也不例外，尤其是考虑到它将对所有员工产生深远影响。“如果最高管理层不公开表示支持，就没人会支持了。”
除非你得到“董事会、首席执行官和高管的坚定支持”，否则这是失败的秘诀，Ambrozie表示赞同。他强调:“(首席数字官)将带头进行这些努力，但在这些个人背后，必须有董事会的支持。”
八、IT不理解业务，业务不理解IT
Spires指出，IT的任务是改变底层技术，但业务部门往往不明白他们需要什么。“你需要企业领导层说，‘我拥有成果，技术拥有成果的交付。’双方往往都缺乏专业知识。”
他说，当业务方面没有明确表示自己的角色时，技术团队就会觉得有义务介入，但通常情况下，技术团队“不知道业务需要什么来承担这个角色”。当这种情况发生时，技术团队正在代表业务部门做出决策，而业务部门并没有适当地参与其中。“我经常看到这种情况，”Spires说。
Roman说，IT部门也可能未能传达转型的“原因”和好处。
他说:“有时候，IT部门并没有有效地向员工传达这些好处以及‘对我有什么好处’。”“当缺乏有效、一致的沟通时，数字转型的努力往往会失败，或者无法获得IT所希望的采用。”
你必须在整个组织内部进行协作，以确保每个人都在向数字化迈进，Seetharaman补充道。“水涨船高，这是过去两年学到的重要一课。”
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原文：
Digital transformations can go off the rails in the best of times, but the past two years have wreaked additional havoc since employees began working remotely.
Timing being what it is, though, with organizations hyperfocused on digitization, it’s more important than ever to address issues and fix problematic projects. Organizations can’t afford to fail at digital transformations, given that “We have now entered the era of the digital business, where transformation must be part of enterprise DNA.’’ According to IDC’s 2023 FutureScape: Worldwide CIO Agenda 2023 Predictions.
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Learn from your peers: Check out our State of the CIO report on the challenges and concerns of CIOs today. | Find out the 7 skills of successful digital leaders and the secrets of highly innovative CIOs.
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IDC defines digital businesses as dynamic enterprises that should continuously evolve their operating models and the digital platforms underpinning their operations. “In this new world, IT isn’t an organization — it’s the very fabric of the enterprise,’’ the IDC report observes. “CIOs will have to find new ways to govern IT as the tentacles of digital technology extend ever deeper into the enterprise and its ecosystems.”
Here are eight reasons digital transformations continue to fail.
Transforming on the fly
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, “people looked at the challenges and came up with in-the-moment solutions” to address them. Says Michael Spires, principal and technology transformation lead at Hackett Group.
Hackett Group
This means they were not addressing underlying technology issues or how to get the work done. But instead adopting a “we’ve got a crisis and we responded” attitude, he says. Hackett’s research has found that while IT delivered on the ability to work remotely and CIOs raised their profiles in the organization, it was “at the cost of building on top of suboptimal platforms.”
This may have been the case if IT used older underlying technologies that were not integrated or because of organizational growth through acquisitions and IT did not migrate the disparate technologies to a common platform, Spires says.
IT changed how it responded to the business — in good ways, he added. “But with technology that hadn’t been rationalized or optimized. So platforms weren’t as stable.”
It’s one thing to throw resources at a problem to achieve results during a crisis. But that is not sustainable, Spires says. “You can do that for six to 18 months to get to where you have to be to meet market challenges that exist because of COVID. But it doesn’t build a long-term, transformed technology platform and it hasn’t necessarily changed the way you meet with stakeholders.”
As a result of these practices, many IT leaders find themselves only now taking on their pandemic technical debt.
Not having a clear vision
When organizations choose to do an industrialization type of transformation, which involves upgrading the tech backbone first, there are very few early rewards, says Stephanie Woerner, director of the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) and principal research scientist.
MIT Sloan CISR
An organization’s operational backbone will depend on the type of company it is, she explains. It could mean implementing an SAP system or a core banking platform.
“It’s kind of a difficult slog to get through, and if you don’t have a vision in mind and you can’t communicate that, it makes it hard for your people until you … hit some productivity gains,’’ Woerner says.
Additionally, companies often forget that a digital transformation is really doing two things at once: digitizing your backbone as well as automating and simplifying by ideally, reusing components or processes, says Woerner, who is also co-author of the recently released book Future Ready: The Four Pathways to Capturing Digital Value.
For instance, when onboarding a customer, companies should identify the best way to do that and then reuse that process again and again. They should also reuse data instead of trying to re-create it from scratch every time, she maintains.
“The issue there is senior executives fall into the trap of not putting some attention toward the customer.’’ When they are putting in the operational backbone for a digital initiative, Woerner says. “I think what has happened in the last two years is that the need to also accommodate customer initiatives at the same time has been overlooked.”
CISR’s research has shown that when companies are transforming themselves now, “It’s not just about the operational backbone; it’s also simultaneously about delighting the customer.”
Baptist Health South Florida
Digital initiatives will fail when there is a “lack of a brutally clear vision and strategy,’’ says Tony Ambrozie, senior vice president and chief digital officer and information officer at Baptist Health South Florida.
But even with great vision, strategy, and support of the board, failures can occur without “clear and crisp goals and targets along the way so everybody understands whether the success is happening and the transformation is successful,’’ Ambrozie says.
Failures can also occur when there is no planning done ahead of time for a digital transformation. “Plans may be useless but planning is priceless,’’ he says. “There’s no replacement for rigorous execution” along with the allocation of dedicated resources.
Forgetting to take the customer along on the journey
A digital transformation may also fail if you haven’t figured out how to migrate your customers to your new way of doing business, Woerner says.
For example, “digital banks are very exciting but if you haven’t figured out how to get your customers to use this new bank. You’re stuck with two business units doing the same thing.’’ Meaning one still has to conduct transactions in-person while the other has shifted to online banking.
“If you cannot move your customers from in-person to online banking because you haven’t figured out how to migrate them over and there’s a lot of resistance from customers … that’s a failure,” she says.
CISR has seen this happen especially with banks — they have great ideas about transforming themselves, “and then they realize. We forgot to take the customer,” Woerner says.
Just as you would typically conduct a lot of training for your employees. You almost have to provide organizational training for your customers as well. This can be done in the form of communications, she says.
The primary purpose of a digital transformation is to serve the customer better. And then the organization and its employees, agrees Ambrozie.
The culture shock challenge
Similarly, while digital transformations typically have architecture and technology solutions challenges, culture change is the No. 1 challenge, says Raju Seetharaman, senior vice president of IT and transformation at Legal & General America’s insurance division.
Legal & General America
“Stakeholders are used to the way they’re working and there is change resistance and you have to manage that change,’’ Seetharaman says. “It’s about bringing them on a journey” and figuring out how to manage change.
He advises giving employees an early release of the product being transformed. If it’s a big platform change, give them a minimum viable product or a demo so they can provide feedback and feel like they’re part of the journey, he says. IT should also deliver quick improvements if stakeholders don’t like something. Otherwise, the product may be destined to fail.
Woerner agrees, saying that in her research, most failures have occurred when CIOs and other leaders do not get everyone on board and deal with the culture change digital brings by conducting training programs.
“Most of those efforts will not be very successful because to change a culture you have to change your habits — and that’s changing the ways people work,’’ she says. “So we suggest people really work on those new ways of working like making sure [employees are] very good at agile and bringing data into the process” instead of creating hypotheses.
Lack of long-term commitment
Not having enough funding and business acumen are other sure-fire ways a digital initiative can fail, says Franzuha Byrd, CIO at MorganFranklin Consulting.
MorganFranklin Consulting
“Technology leaders are great at implementing technology but ask them to articulate the value of a digital transformation project in financial terms, and most fall short,’’ Byrd says. “I often encounter unrealistic expectations. Expecting a technology leader to achieve a high degree of alignment with desired business outcomes if they don’t have a strong business background is impractical.”
It’s important for these initiatives to have dedicated, multi-year budgets and commitments to sustain them through the good years — and the bad, says Ambrozie.
“Organizations, and especially the CFO, must have a clear understanding of the returns on investment — how will they be manifested and when.” So there is no expectation the ROI will be immediate, he says. “Otherwise, there’s a risk of judging the beginning as a failure instead of the start of a long-term success.”
Not thinking tactically about tools
As organizations think about the tools they need to drive digital adoption and tech implementations. Many haven’t taken a step back to first consider what the organization needs, says Spires. One part of a tech organization might latch onto a tool and decide it needs to be used elsewhere but that leads to a lack of meaningful coordination for adopting a common toolset, he says.
“Then you have fractured expertise on multiple tools,’’ Spires says. “Decisions are made in haste and in the moment” without thinking about what the transformation effort needs.
This leads to “not thinking big picture, but tactically, and in crisis and in the moment,’’ he says. “We’re still seeing a lot of silos and … [IT is] not managing that holistically. That leads to a proliferation of tools and a lack of common tools.”
Given the IT staffing shortage right now, the more tools that are added, the more you will “only replicate the problem instead of addressing it via the right tool,’’ Spires says.
Lack of leadership support
The Bonadio Group
Most technology initiatives fail without the support of the C-suite, and digital transformation is no different. Especially given the far-reaching impact it will have on all employees, says John Roman. CIO of The Bonadio Group, a national accounting and financial services firm. “If the C-suite isn’t vocal in their support, no one will be.”
Unless you have “the unwavering support of the board, CEO, and senior executives,” That is a recipe for failure, concurs Ambrozie. “A [chief digital officer] will spearhead these efforts. But behind those individuals, there must be that support of the board,’’ he stresses.
Business units don’t understand their role
IT’s mission is to change the underlying technology but the business often doesn’t understand what’s required of them, Spires notes. “You need business leadership to say, ‘I own the outcomes and tech owns the delivery of that.’ Expertise is often lacking on both sides.”
When the business side doesn’t articulate its role, the tech team feels obligated to step in, he says. But often it is “not appropriately knowledgeable of what the business wants in a way to take on that role.” When that happens, the tech team is making decisions on behalf of a business unit, which is not properly engaged. “I see this a lot,’’ Spires says.
There can also be a failure on IT’s part to communicate the “whys” and benefits of the transformation, says Roman.
“Sometimes, IT doesn’t effectively communicate the benefits and the ‘what’s in it for me’ to employees,’’ he says. “When there is a lack of effective, consistent communication. Digital transformation efforts often fail or do not garner the adoption IT hopes.”
You have to collaborate within the entire organization to ensure everyone is moving toward digitization, adds Seetharaman. “A rising tide lifts all the boats, and that’s been a key lesson learned in the past two years.”
本文由数字化转型网翻译而来，文章翻译：数字化转型网郑亚茹；翻译审核：数字化转型网默然。
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