Digital Transformation and People

Organisations often run head-long into digital transformation, with a focus on technology and toolsets, and not fully understanding the impact on staff. Digital transformation is more than just moving all paper processes into electronic versions of themselves, more than just running out some new collaborative tools or enabling legacy applications to be accessible through web browsers.

Process complexity

Whilst many recognise that digital transformation is more about people and processes than it is about technology or tools, there is still a problem with transformation. Many business functions are in danger of falling into a trap whereby the level of complexity introduced by their new platform or service does not match up with the training or skill-set of their staff, leaving them in a position which requires a lot of time-wasting manual intervention.

Digital transformation is not just getting rid of non-digital systems

Many organisations conflate digital transformation with the process of digitising paper forms into an exact copy of the form in to a web page, or taking a manual or paper process and trying to automate the exact process into a digital form. However this will not deliver benefits, and may even cause more delays and inefficiencies.

The key to successful digital transformation is to automate only the parts of the business process that need automating. If an organisation’s leadership is not systems experienced, or has become used to the kind of automation not appropriate to their business’s size, then those organisations are in danger of neglecting staff competency.

There really is no substitute for the human touch, where people need to get involved in the processes. We can’t automate everything, but a good step is to start integrating trusted and functioning systems with the new technologies, to allow a source of truth to be trusted by staff.

Successful digital transformation is about getting the human and technological aspects of the business function working in tandem. If you just go straight to the top end of complexity, then you get bogged down and end up creating new problems which hadn’t existed before.