Smart use of data is now at the heart of every successful organisation. Working with clients across the Channel Islands, I’ve seen the game-changing potential firsthand, from sharpening decision-making and strengthening customer experience to driving efficiency, productivity and revenue generation.
But some organisations are moving further and faster down the transformation journey than others. Indeed, one of the most common questions we hear from new clients who come to us for help is “we’ve invested all this money in new systems, so why aren’t we getting the payback?”
And as a range of research underlines, this marked variation in digital performance and return is prevalent across both private and public sectors, and could undermine the economic viability of some organisations.
The missing dimension
So what’s holding up progress? By far the biggest stumbling blocks centre around culture, skills, and trust. Technology is often sold as the answer to all challenges and a gateway to the future. In reality, it’s only part of a solution that needs human ingenuity and insight as much as technology.
Stepping up
So how can your organisation unleash your human-led, tech-powered potential?
Five priorities stand out:
1. People, people, people
An empowered and engaged workforce holds the key to unlocking the data and digital dividend. People, not systems, drive innovation and change. And it’s skilled and motivated people who make the most of the potential.
Upskilling is clearly a critical part of this. But digital skills aren’t enough on their own. Your people need to know how to apply their new capabilities in their everyday work. How well can they interpret the analysis at their disposal, for example? What new insights can they derive?
And this focus on people applies to your leadership and customers as much as frontline employees. Does your board set the tone from the top in areas such as data-enabled decisions? Do customers believe that digital engagement will improve experience rather than just being a money-saving exercise?
2. Make the cultural leap
Becoming a digital-first, data-driven organisation is much a cultural as a technological shift – new ways of working, making decisions and engaging with customers. Are you doing enough to communicate the benefits – less time on mundane tasks and more time adding real value, for example? How can you create champions for change and address potential anxieties?
A key part of this shift in mindset is a readiness to experiment even if this can end up in failure. Accepting this up front as part of a ‘fail fast’ approach would help you to quickly identify what went wrong, address it and learn from the experience.
3. Create agile foundations for modernisation
It’s important to have a vision of where you want to be as your business and its marketplace evolve. But one of the key benefits of today’s versatile systems and operating platforms is allowing you to update and modernise in iterative stages rather than one costly and high risk ‘big bang’.
A key part of this modernisation centres around how the data is presented. Dashboards and visualisation tools are not only helping to make the outputs more intelligible, but also allowing you to drill deeper into and interrogate your data.
It’s also important to look across your digital ecosystem at where the data is coming from, its relative reliability and how it’s used. This will help inform the development of validation and reconciliation processes.
4. Embrace change as it happens
With the foundations for modernisation in place, you can focus on how to keep pace with evolving demands and drive continuous improvement. Is our customer experience sufficiently compelling, for example? How can we differentiate ourselves against our competitors? What combination of talent and technology would enable us to deliver?
5. Strengthen security and trust
Trust cuts across all these attributes for success.
Data-driven decision-making is only as valuable as the information that feeds into it – rubbish in inevitably leads to rubbish out. It’s therefore important to ensure that data governance evolves at the same rate as the technology and innovation that drives data sourcing and deployment.
Similarly, cyber vulnerabilities will inevitably increase as data proliferates and more of your operations are digitised. So it’s important to foster organisation-wide understanding and responsibility for managing the risks.
Sharing insight and experience
If you would like to know more about what marks out the data and digital front- runners, we can share our experiences of working on a range of successful digital transformation projects.
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