The best Digital strategy is a people strategy

The best Digital strategy is a people strategy

Recently at a business lunch, I was asked to share my thoughts on strategies for building a talent pipeline for the digital age. I spoke for several minutes, and when I finished sharing my perspective I was caught a little off-guard when the client said “Wow, that was pretty impressive for a tech consultant.” Granted, this is not a totally unnatural response as it’s common for business leaders to assume digital transformation is solely about technology; when in reality, the most successful companies know that digital transformation is more about people-centric business transformation enabled by digital technology. In responding to my client, my honest answer was “as a digital transformation leader, what I focus on first is always people.”

I have had the privilege of helping global companies for over two decades design and execute major transformations in a variety of forms and methods. When I first started my career, Y2K was on everyone’s mind, and we have quickly moved through and into the ages of the dot com boom, big data, customer relationship management (CRM), analytics…well, you get the idea. The one thing that I have learned over the last two decades is that no matter how shiny or fancy the newest tech trend is, people always remain at the center of every well executed transformation process. In fact, most estimates show that technology itself only represents about 40% of the total effort at the end of a transformation project.

Here are three ways to keep people at the center of your digital transformation:

• Start your Digital transformation with a focus on the customer or consumer
  • Modern technologies enable businesses to collect and analyze data about their customers and get to know them even more better than they know themselves. The winners will have figured out how to curate customer journeys, informed by the right data, resulting in a delightful experience.
  • Sustainable value also requires a focus on developing internal business models that enable the agility, repeatability, and efficiency demanded by the customer or consumer
• Remember that employees are people too
  • The employee experience is as critical as the customer experience
  • Virtual concierges or helpers (like Siri or Alexa) can deliver just as much benefit, if not more, to employees as they can to a consumer. Integrating these virtual experience technologies into the workplace is necessary as it becomes the new normal for most employees during their home life and personal interactions.
  • Talent is always your most valuable resource. The ability to attract and retain top tier talent will determine the difference between a successful digital transformation strategy and an unsuccessful one.
  • With the advent of intelligent automation, employee tolerance for repetitive mundane tasks is waning.  As a matter of fact, some experts believe that close to 30% of work done today could and should be automated in order to free up capacity to focus on more meaningful and rewarding career experiences.
• Plan to engage your transformation team and key stakeholders “early and often”
  • The people that got you to where you are today will likely feel anxiety about the new digital tools and solutions – find these people early, help them pivot, and set them up to succeed
  • I have always found that what defines a happy client is not necessarily the nature of the solution we are delivering, but instead the ability to look a business leader in the eye, distill what is important to her, and delivering impact in a way that she and her stakeholders will appreciate.  To do this it is critical to be able to read a room,  respect every “other” opinion along the way, and lead through challenges towards an outcome that garners buy in from all impacted.

We are still just at the beginning of this digital transformation age, which gives business leaders tremendous opportunity to find balance between the adoption of new technologies and the tried and true principles that have proven so necessary to success over the decades: “People focused, business led, technology enabled”