upskilling once employees are in your workforce. I once managed to persuade my grandfather to buy a cellphone; he never even bothered to take it out of the box. For many organizations, persuading experienced employees or senior managers to deploy new tech tools is a rather similar experience.
It’s problematic when companies decide to embark on a digital transformation agenda without having a clear definition, let alone vision, for what it means. Although every organization is unique, and there are salient differences between types of businesses, industries, and cultures, the fundamental
meaning of transformation is not about replacing old technologies with new ones, or capturing high volumes of data, or hiring an army of data scientists, or trying to copy some of the things Google or Amazon do. In fact, the essence of digital transformation is to become a data-driven organization, ensuring that key decisions, actions, and processes are strongly influenced by data-driven insights, rather than by human intuition. In other words, you will only transform when you have managed to change how people behave, and how things are done in your organization.
As the figure below shows, five components are needed to execute an organization’s digital transformation: