itSMF Bulletin February 2022 | Page 7

5. Results

In the final stage of the process, you can evaluate results or impact. Except this is  not really the final step — after you evaluate results, you need to go back to the data. The results themselves become part of the new, richer, dataset, which will be augmented and improved with the findings of the process. In this iterative process or retroactive feedback loop, you enable your insights to become more predictive, more meaningful, and more valuable, which itself gives more value to the data. And in that process, you enhance and develop the people skills that are needed to produce a great synergy between humans and technology.

In short, the critical part of digital transformation is not “digital” but “transformation.” Our world has changed dramatically in the past two decades, and adapting your organization to these changes cannot be achieved overnight, or simply by

buying new technologies, or collecting more data. What is needed is a shift in mindset, culture, and talent, including upskilling and reskilling your workforce so that they are future-ready. That said, there is one thing that hasn’t changed — namely the fact that all of this is just the new version of an old task or challenge every leader has always faced throughout human history: to prepare their teams and organizations for the future, and create a better future. Nobody is truly a leader if they are in charge and keep things as they are. Leadership is always an argument with the past, with tradition — it is the essential task of leaders to create a bridge between the past and the future, and in that sense digital transformation is not an exception to the rule, but the name we give to today’s bridge.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the Chief Innovation Officer at ManpowerGroup, a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, co-founder of deepersignals.com, and an associate at Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. He is the author of  Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (and How to Fix It), upon which his TEDx talk  was based. Find him on Twitter: @drtcp or at  www.drtomas.com.    

 

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