Digital transformation is unquestionably a blisteringly hot topic across enterprises today. Companies in every industry have fallen into the vast digital maelstrom, as customer demands and software innovation form the Scylla and Charybdis that threaten to sink even the largest, most venerable brands.
And yet, we’ve been down this road before – not so much the digital part, but certainly the transformation part. After all, digital transformation is business transformation, and business transformation has been a management consulting staple since Frederick Taylor at the very least.
Every generation, it seems, sports its own business transformation du jour. From Business Process Reengineering (BPR) to the Quality Movement to eBusiness to name a few, organizations large and small have sought to improve their profits, lower their costs, and keep their customers happy by shaking up the way they do things.
While each of these business transformation fads delivered value in its time, in the wisdom of hindsight they all ran up against the same basic challenge: inflexibility.
BPR improved efficiency but led to inflexible processes. Quality efforts like Six Sigma reduced defects but “poured concrete” around processes, thus impeding innovation. And the eBusiness wave got enterprises online to be sure, but it didn’t take long until architectural and legacy technology challenges limited their flexibility.
Read the entire article at http://insights.btoes.com/business-transformation-operational-excellence/article/digital-transformation-youre-probably-doing-it-wrong.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers.
