By Charles Araujo
It’s funny how some things — important ideas in particular — seem to go through cycles.
For a while, they’re the most important thing you’ve ever worked on. Then you reach a point where things settle down and you move on, until one day these ideas come roaring back with newfound relevance.
I’m having one of those moments right now around an important topic that I’ve been working on for several years: readiness.
And, as I’ll explain in a moment, the reason the importance of readiness has come roaring back into my consciousness is because of its relationship to something that is a top-of-mind issue for everyone right now: resilience.
THE BIG IDEA: THE DIGITAL ENTERPRISE READINESS INVESTMENT
Four years ago or so, back when Digital Transformation was just starting to pick up steam, I was already getting sick of it.
Everywhere I turned, tech companies were throwing around the term like it was candy (and they were standing creepily outside an open van door!).
I was frustrated because I had spent my career living what it meant to really do digital transformation, but that wasn’t the conversation most enterprise leaders were having with their vendors and consultants. Instead, everything kept coming back down to executing a digital transformation project.
I realized that part of the issue was that we were all talking about digital transformation as an end-state. It made sense, therefore, that if we were envisioning an end state that it would take a project to get us there. And that’s when it dawned on me that we were looking at this all wrong.
