How culture drives digital transformation

One of the reasons that large organisations struggle to move quickly is that their culture has been developed over many years to thrive in a certain competitive environment, and suddenly they are thrown into something completely different.

The rise of digital technology has created a number of challenges for today's corporate.

The combination of market fragmentation, the rapid rise of consumer choice and expectations, digital start-ups delivering niche propositions, changing media patterns, and global players entering local markets has created the perfect storm.

 


 

Understandably, this has led many large businesses to see Digital Transformation as an important strategic focus.

Digital transformation is the process of an organisation adopting some or all of the core components of digital technology (cloud, mobile, social, data) to achieve their strategic objectives.

Generally this means re-evaluating business models, value chains, customer propositions, operations, and channel and go to market strategies.

It's really hard for large organisations to do this effectively at the pace required to remain competitive.

One of the reasons that large organisations struggle to move quickly is that their culture has been developed over many years to thrive in a certain competitive environment, and suddenly they are thrown into something completely different.

Developing a "digital culture" is often seen as being an important success factor to enable digital transformation.

After all, every business is only as strong as its people, and without a digital culture it's difficult to see how a business can continue to remain relevant.

But what is a digital culture?

Fussball tables, slides next to the stairs, and free fruit are not a digital culture.

A digital culture means looking across the organisation as a whole and asking the question "to what extent are our people empowered and encouraged to contribute and collaborate using digital thinking and technologies?"

You may be surprised at the number of organisations that are trying to reinvent their customer facing propositions, but failing to make any real internal cultural changes, or even to understand what good looks like in this area.

Digital creates the opportunity to do things differently, and a digital culture works with, and accelerates the opportunity.

For example, a digital culture trusts workers to do their jobs well irrespective of location. A digital culture encourages experimentation and iteration, and accepts failure as a component of success.

But most importantly, a well-implemented digital culture encourages freedom of expression, transparency, collaboration, and flattens the organisational structure.

In traditional business cultures, ideas are really assets to be "owned". In a digital culture, ideas are collective. Digital lets the people who want to engage on an initiative self-select, and contribute to the subject areas where they're passionate.

Digital can break down silos and open direct lines of communications across the business. For example a finance manager can contribute to app design, sales staff can contribute to product development, developers can communicate freely with call centre.

Digital collaboration platforms like Slack, Yammer, and Chatter are designed to help bring teams together to work more collaboratively and share ideas. But they don't work unless people use them. And that comes down to leadership. If my manager uses it, I will.

 


 

There's no one size fits all approach to developing a digital culture. It all sounds quite utopian, especially in the context of hard targets like market penetration, sales revenue, customer acquisition, and conversion improvement.

But by developing a digital culture, large organisations can unlock the potential within their people, attract and retain digital talent, and start to compete in today's challenging market conditions.