How can leadership impact the success of digital transformation initiatives?
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PWC recently published that 74% of business leaders are engaged in a cloud strategy. But 53% have yet to realize substantial value. It’s not surprising, but why is that? It's not just about organizational design. It's about the leadership at the top: Is the CEO fully committed to the transformation or have they delegated this to somebody in the organization?
Because we've all seen that when you have the right leadership in place, when the person at the top has the vision and drive to make that happen, it does permeate down into the organization. When you see leaders that are not fully committed, you can expect a subpar outcome.
In some respects, in the same way, it's easy to blame IT for the collaboration mess that we have, it's also easy to blame IT for unsuccessful transformations. It's not actually about the technology, it's about the culture. You're getting to the heart of what the organization’s culture is.
The term “digital transformation” isn’t very useful now because what's not digital? Ultimately these are business transformations that will be enabled by technology and the person who owns the transformation on the OKRs is the CEO. That doesn't mean he's in every detail but all of the major decisions will be streamed up to him and he's the ultimate decision maker on all of them. Culture is the behaviors that people exhibit. You can talk about the values, but they manifest themselves in behaviors and how you reward them or don't. And I don't think that we're going to get to the business transformation if we don't successfully execute the other piece of it.