TEACHING BUSINESSES TO GO DIGITAL
Businesses and governments are facing increasing and accelerating change in the modern digital era, and coping with the resulting cultural shift is their top challenge, new research suggests.
CIOs and CEOs are finding a gap between their enterprises’ goals and the reality of achieving them, compounded by a growing need for leadership skills to navigate change brought on by technology, according to global research and advisory company Gartner, Inc.
“We’ve been telling our clients for the last five or six years to be prepared for, and to be ready to address, digital business,” Suzanne Adnams, vicepresident at Gartner says. “The reality is that digital business is here now. You can’t prepare for it anymore, you’re now living in it.”
As a result, the task facing executives and managers is to change core infrastructure, operations and production so they are geared toward success in the digital realm. Company and technology leaders have received that message, but are falling short on execution, research suggests.
“It is a complete revolution of the business model,” Adnams says. “We’re at a point where we are changing the very nature of how we interact with others. We are now leveraging information, leveraging technology outcomes in order to achieve something that we did not have before.”
The distinction between applying technology to management and using it as a foundation to create new ways to interact, new products, and new modes of engaging with people is not necessarily obvious on its face. Digital business transformation is akin to the industrial revolution, when society moved from an agrarian, rural, manual business model to an urban, mechanized, manufacturing and factory-based one. Digital technologies are similarly changing the paradigm.
Most executives over the last 50 years have been trained in and focused on management: guiding processes and maintaining efficient and effective operations. It is what management techniques were designed for, Adnams says. In a digital society, all of that changes.
“Our role and relationship with clients and customers, the way we interact with them, the way that we provide services and products to them — and those very services and products themselves — are totally new and different than they were five years ago.”
Gartner has recognized these shifts. The firm pursued its own digital transformation more than two years ago, moving from being an information technology company to becoming a research and advisory company for all levels of an organization. “That was a big shift for us,” Adnams says.
That is the same kind of shift that modern organizations must make to survive and thrive in a digital world, according to 46 per cent of CIOs Gartner surveyed, who foresee revenue risk due to digital disruption. “We have all of these little technologies behind the scenes that each on its own is doing some fairly fundamental things. But when you combine them all together, it provides an entirely new way of living, and that is our digital society,” Adnams says. “If you cannot inspire and engage your workforce, if you can’t improve and have an understanding of what the customer and employee experience requires, then you will not be able to retain them through the quick business cycles we have now.”
To address these urgent needs, Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Toronto, June 3 to 6, offers executive and management seminars on information technology, leadership, and business strategy.
“In a digital organization, you can’t separate these three aspects,” Adnams says. “A business decision is a technology decision, and a technology decision is a business decision. At the centre of everything is people, our culture, and how we lead through change.”
Register today using priority code CIOCA1 to save $600 off the standard registration rate. And find Gartner on social media: on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.