How to Increase Trust Factor Towards Digital Transformation
Make digital transformation trust a priority with an agile, collaborative technology evaluation process.
Digital transformation is a significant paradigm shift in recent microeconomic history, yet many businesses are still hesitant to embrace it. Over 70% of digital transformations fail, often due to a lack of internal trust in digital transformation initiatives. In this post, we’ll discuss the importance of building trust in digital transformation and how collaboration can increase user adoption and ensure success. Over 70% of digital transformations fail, arguably because of a lack of internal trust in digital transformation initiatives.
Contributing factors include insufficiently high aspirations, a lack of engagement within the organization, and insufficient investment in building capabilities across the organization to sustain the change, among others.
Companies miss out on swathes of opportunity because they’re reluctant, scared, confused, indifferent, or arrogant. There is no better example than Blockbuster, who could have bought Netflix for $50 million.
If you don’t know what digital transformation is, just look at the industries around you. See the evolved version of old companies that used to dominate. Look at Bookmans, B-Dalton, and Border’s Books. Now, look at Amazon. Look at Blockbuster v Netflix. B&Bs v Airbnb. Even look at the legal industry. Predictive AI tools are saving companies and individuals from ever having to go to court. Lawyers not using these tools cost their clients thousands.
Digital transformation is the integration of technology into every business process, from assembly lines to sales. It forces you to rethink how you deliver value in line with the modern era, and most importantly, it enhances profitability, reduces costs, and opens up new markets.
Companies who hold off on making changes will be forced to play catch up later. While doing so, they will make reactionary, rushed decisions sinking costs into incompatible tech that doesn’t solve their problems.
Why is Trust Important in Digital Transformation?
The reluctance to embrace digital transformation can stem from a variety of reasons such as fear, confusion, indifference, or arrogance. Companies that resist change risk falling behind and making reactionary, rushed decisions that waste resources on incompatible technology.
To avoid this fate, it’s essential to prioritize digital transformation and gain internal stakeholder trust. Collaboration is key to ensuring a successful transformation because it fosters engagement, managerial support, inter-departmental cooperation, and effective resistance to change.
Whether you are the CIO, CEO, Director of Digital or IT, or anyone else charged with spearheading the transformation, doing it alone usually leads to failure. At least 70% of the time it does because you aren’t the only one affected so you shouldn’t be the lone voice represented.
Digital transformation and software introductions fail most often because there is a lack of employee engagement, resistance to change managerial support, inter-departmental collaboration, and feeble attempts at addressing the resistance to change. This can affect employee trust in digital transformation and lead to low user adoption.
Don’t assume you know what people in your organization need. If you want to be one of the success stories, you need to include your team throughout the process. The key to a successful transformation is facilitating agile collaboration and growing trust in digital transformation in your organization. This leads to higher user adoption.
How to Increase the Trust Factor Towards Digital Transformation
1. Collaborate to define the business problem
Your team and stakeholders meet different problems and inefficiencies every single day. They know what works, what doesn’t work, and what absolutely needs improvement. They are at the coal face implementing stop-gap measures and band-aid solutions when they know there are better tools out there. This applies to all industries, from marketing to manufacturing and from customer care to construction.
Sit down with your stakeholders and discuss the problems they experience. Shadow them, host round tables, virtual conferences, 1 to 1 meetings, or whatever else is needed to gain an understanding of what the specific problems are and what requirements a software solution needs to have to fix them.
2. Collaborate to gather and rank requirements
Record every problem and requirement in an excel sheet or using a tool like Olive. Once you capture what the problems and requirements are, have your stakeholders rank them in order of importance. These are what you will take to the market in search of a solution. Share this information with key stakeholders so they feel bought into the process and understand the broader context as to why some requirements are ranked higher than others. When you have gathered a shortlist of your preferred vendor options, ask stakeholders to attend demos and give you feedback.
3. Test the adoption of the solutions, get feedback
Survey and record feedback on the solution chosen post-implementation. Listen to what’s needed and strategize solutions with key stakeholders. Digital transformation success is measured by user adoption. This isn’t a possibility without talking to the right stakeholders and understanding their needs. Collaborating with the right stakeholders reduces the risk of choosing the wrong solution. The only people that can help you increase user adoption are the eventual end-users.
Build Digital Transformation Trust into your Strategy with Olive
Collaboration with stakeholders is time-consuming, but it’s necessary to ensure boots-on-the-ground staff and customers have a positive experience. Olive is a platform that streamlines the process of incorporating stakeholder opinions to make collectively supported decisions faster.
Capturing stakeholders’ opinions at each turn is painstakingly slow, but it will be the boots-on-the-ground staff responsible for using the tools and your customers’ experience who will experience the results, so they must be heard. As soon as you bypass your stakeholder’s opinions, you risk implementation failure.
Olive provides you with a way to incorporate the opinions of the right stakeholders who should be heard, without feeling like you’re wading through tar. We issue employee surveys to gather views on problems and pain points and determine what they need in your future software or tech stack.
We gather and document the results easily on our platform, making it easy to see how many people suggested the same features. They are then invited to rank the requirements generated from the feedback forms.
Systemizing the process on our platform eliminates the extensive overheads of meeting individually, chasing internal questionnaires, facilitating meetings, and job shadowing. We help you make collectively supported decisions faster.
Why Trust in Digital Transformation is a Top Priority
1. You can’t avoid it
You can’t, it’s happening now, and has only accelerated. In the infamous words of Mikhail Gorbachev, “If you don’t move forward, sooner or later you begin to move backward”.
Gorbachev may not have been discussing digital transformation, but the sentiment is perfectly apt. There is no stationary in today’s business world. Everything is in flux because customers have infinite needs and things can always be more convenient, cheaper, or better.
2. Your competition is already transforming
The common acronym thrown around is VUCA meaning the markets you face are volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
Competitors will always rock the boat looking for a competitive edge. When they find a more streamlined manufacturing software or ERP, their offerings become comparatively less expensive. So as they transform, you start moving backward.
3. Customer expectations are growing
A customer chose a competitor over you today because your processes made their lives more difficult.
Customers, particularly digital customers, are like lightning. They take the path of least resistance. They want same-day shipping, one-click orders, zero human interaction and a trustworthy returns policy. The problem for providers is that at least one of your competitors provides it, and everyone else gets compared to the best in class.
If you have a comparatively sloppy sales experience, you get relegated. CX is a huge differentiator for customers and if you don’t iron out the kinks, they move on. Again, the problem is the goalposts keep moving. When someone else innovates, even outside your market, the customer wants that level of service. You have little choice but to keep up.
Digital Transformation is not an event; it’s a constant
Many CIOs think they don’t have a project or a need right now. That’s fine, except it is not true.
To keep up with the evolution of your industry, you have to stop treating software like you’re buying a house and start treating it like visiting the hairdresser. If your software or hair is left without attention, you soon start looking like you’ve regressed to the 80s.
Make digital transformation a key strategic pillar of your organization even if your IT budget is frozen. Build it into your processes because there is always a more significant ROI possible from your tech stack. If you don’t derive an ROI, you’re not doing enough for your stakeholders.
Making digital transformation a constant process might be a full-time job but the competitive gains far outweigh the costs. If you don’t have the capacity to hire full-time, but need the same result, talk to us!
Get your Organization to Trust Digital Transformation, with Olive
Digital transformation is a significant opportunity for companies to enhance profitability, reduce costs, and open up new markets. To take advantage of this opportunity, it’s essential to prioritize digital transformation and build trust with stakeholders through collaboration. Olive is a platform that streamlines the collaboration process, ensuring that stakeholder opinions are heard, and decisions are made faster.
