Welcome Back, Kotter or Digitisation through Change Management #

Digitisation and Success #

In this pandemic cycle, the Digitisation of the business is more important than ever to thriving as a business. However, evidence suggests that there are still the same stumbling blocks now (Digital transformation: 5 reasons why it still fails) and in the past (Why digital transformations fail: 3 exhausting reasons). Broadly speaking, the failings fall into the following categories:

Category 1: Not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition #

Misalignment of vision/goals at the top of the organisation - the CEO's vision for the outcome may be starkly different from the CFO's or Chief Digital Officer's.

Category 2: Lack of consensus and the rise of silos #

Too often, ambitious deadlines are set, so employees aren't adequately briefed and don't fully realise all the organisation's challenges. The lack of understanding leads to people typically retreating to the comfort of their team or group and focusing on themselves and their deliverables, which creates internal silos.

Category 3: Systemically Planning for and Creating short-term wins (No velocity) #

Organisations need to move and scale quickly and fail fast. Set objectives at the outset and ensure that the organisation and stakeholders get wiser every step of the way. In short, the lack of Organisational change management is setting your organisation's transformational efforts up to fail before you even sign your first procurement contract.

Category 4: Making the Digitisation Process about Technology and not people #

Successful Digitisations are about people. Why have so many COVID Digitisation efforts been successful? It's not because of the technology -although that has helped - it's because the organisation's employees understood the reasons why, and there was an urgency for change.

Set yourself up for success #

Kotter's 8 Step change process can help alleviate the organisation change that needs to occur to set your organisation up for successful Digitisation.

Eight steps to successful organisational change #

Step 1: Create a sense of urgency #

Highlight the issue the change is designed to solve. Why does Digitisation need to occur? It's an effective tactic for getting people on board.

Step 2: Build a guiding coalition #

The creation of the guiding team is where leadership comes in. A strong group of people with skills and authority is required to champion the change. The team should be a cross-section from different parts of the business.

Step 3: Form a strategic vision and initiatives #

Now is the time to define the vision. It would also help if you also put success metrics in place. Metrics are an excellent way to measure success or failure for the change.

Step 4: Enlist a volunteer army #

Communication should be clear and constant. Make sure you have the appetite and processes in place for feedback, concerns, and queries. Throughout the change, you need to learn from your successes and failures.

Step 5: Enable action by removing barriers #

Empowerment begins with clearing barriers. If there are any roadblocks to change, deal with them before they slow down the transformation momentum or, worse, disenfranchise employees.

Step 6: Generate short-term wins #

Always celebrate success. The organisation should maintain good morale throughout the change process, often prolonged.

Step 7: Sustain acceleration #

Use any short-term wins to encourage additional change and turn the success into acceleration.

Step 8: Institute change #

Embed the change into the organisational culture. This can be done by documenting the process that leaders must execute.

Follow these eight rules to take an intentional approach to digitalisation. Kotter's organisational change model offers a framework for smoother digital transitions. And better results.

Another change management model that may help is the ADKAR (https://www.prosci.com/methodology/adkar) model.

Please reach out to HSD to discuss the people side of Digitisation. HSD can also help you generate short term wins with DCMA. By extending the Dynamics 365 case management system, DCMA takes your applications, complaints, and inquiries processes and turns them into dedicated workflows, increasing your organisational productivity.