While digital is such a pervasive trend impacting every industry, and while most enterprises are committing significant investments to digital transformation, the impact of these investments has fallen short of expectations in many cases. Why is that? The failures are both those of strategy and of execution. However, there is something more fundamental at work here. Most traditional companies underachieve at digital because they fail to recognize that many of the fundamentals of business have changed in this VUCA world.
Customers are very demanding, data is exploding in volume, variety and velocity, technology is becoming mission critical, the pace of change is very high and business/product cycles are getting crunched, to name just a few of the fundamental shifts. Despite these changes, many enterprises’ approaches to digital lies in extending what has worked in their traditional business to digital. Such an approach is doomed to fail.
Every enterprise needs to understand how the fundamentals of their business are changing and based on that define their ‘new rules of business’ for application to both strategy and execution to drive a successful digital transformation. In section one, we look at the above challenges and gain perspectives on the ‘new rules’ at three different levels:
- The general level of the VUCA world and overall implications for business
- The digital transformation level
- The level of specific technology elements of digital