Digital transformation: Business modernization requires a new mindset
Digital transformation is more important now than ever, but some organizations are more difficult to change than others.
TechRepublic’s Karen Roby talks with futurist Brian Solis about the hurdles that companies must overcome while working through a digital transformation. The following is an edited transcript of their interview.
Brian Solis: Digital transformation means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I’ve been covering it for the better part of a decade now. Originally, digital transformation really was about migrating to the cloud and modernizing a lot of business infrastructure to essentially allow companies, or organizations, to be more agile and scalable as new technologies come and go. But I think that, in and of itself, was limiting, it was an initial hurdle because it didn’t necessarily give digital transformation a sense of purpose. It just gave it a sense of a roadmap, essentially, of technologies to adopt and test and then scale.
But I’ll tell you that, more often than not, one of the biggest challenges I hear are two things. One is, legacy infrastructure is really difficult to update and upgrade. A lot of these systems are so old but so integrated into the organization that trying to update those with a rip and replace is essentially going to cause havoc. And that’s what a lot of companies are worried about, so they’re trying to take it a little bit slowly, a little bit more strategically.
The other one is mindset. This one, it comes up in pretty much all of the cases of digital transformation. And by that I mean, what is possible with digital transformation if your perspective is rooted, still, not only in legacy systems, but also legacy ideals of what technology can do for the organization: What the market looks like, how an organization should run, what are operational models to support tech, and so on.
Karen Roby: Do companies really even have a choice anymore? Or do they really just have to have the mindset that they must be digitally focused?
Brian Solis: One of the challenges when I study things like innovation, that I hear about, is that culture is actually one of the biggest inhibitors of all things, all progress. Sometimes when I interview executives around culture or innovation or digital transformation, I sometimes feel like I’m not an analyst, that I’m a therapist. A lot of executives actually want to share their frustrations, and one of the frustrations, especially with more, let’s just say, legacy-oriented organizations, I’ll hear about millennials all the time. And then also the coming of centennials. In that they do want to work differently, they do think differently, and infrastructures, and also models, don’t necessarily support that way of thinking and way of working. The consumerization of technology, it hasn’t just affected millennials or the younger workforce, it’s affected all of us.
I think, anybody who has a smartphone or uses social media, or has ordered an Uber or Lyft, or DoorDash, or Postmates, you name it, we have, as human beings, radically transformed. Our brains have radically transformed as we use more of these technologies, we’re multitasking, we’re doing a million things. Employees get something like 200 notifications during their work day, just from their phone and social and email. So a lot of the way that we have to think about work has to change. We have to think bigger than the millennial workforce. We have to give technology that sense of purpose of how should people work. And that means that we have to spend more time looking within the organization, beyond assessments and audits and 360 reviews, to get a better sense of how they want to work and then how we could bring the workforce, not just into a modern era, but modernizing the definition of work itself.
