Who Should Lead Your Digital Transformation
The planning, goals, and investment mean nothing if companies do not have the right people leading the digital transformation process. Since every department will eventually be included in the transformation, there should be company-wide input from all stakeholders. Digital transformation is not just an operations/engineering/IT endeavor. While each department may experience different changes at different times, there must be buy-in across the entire company.
Building consensus and commitment is challenging. About a decade ago, T. J. Sullivan wrote a book called Motivating the Middle: Fighting Apathy in College Student Organizations. It was written for collegiate social organizations, but its truths apply to any type of organization. Sullivan says that all organizations are made up of thirds. The top third are the leaders and drivers who don’t require encouragement to go after their goals and execute them. The bottom third are those who are apathetic—the ones that won’t be convinced to do more than the minimum amount of work and generally follow the path the upper third sets. Finally, there is the middle third. When properly motivated, they will be the force that moves the organization to achieve its goals. With any endeavor, the upper third’s challenge will be “motivating the middle” third and creating buy-in.
While every aspect of the company will be affected and every department and stakeholder should have a say in the vision, there are groups who will play more critical roles in leading digital transformation. As identified in a Rockwell Automation article titled “Who is Leading Your Industrial Digital Transformation”, these groups will be making the key decisions about the process while building organizational consensus:
- Corporate Leadership – These are the people who will be planning the direction of the company as a whole and will justify the digital transformation journey to the board of directors or any other oversight body.
- Finance Leadership – They will oversee the monetary investment in the process and projections of what the return on that investment will be, which is key in helping corporate leadership explain their decision-making.
- Operations Leadership – This group will most likely be the main target for innovation as most change will be directed at operations in some way or another. It will be important to listen to their input about what requires improvement and what roadblocks there are to overcome.
- Systems and Software Developers – Digital transformation implies a pivot toward more digital solutions and data-driven decision making. This group will be key in the implementation of automation, digitalization, and analytics programs. While it’s true that digital transformation is not just operations, engineering, and IT, they still do play the most important roles.
- Engineers & Data Scientists – They will be the ones collecting the desired data, analyzing it, and providing insight to corporate, finance and operations leadership for decision making.
To summarize, it takes a village to lead the digital transformation process. It takes talented and innovative people to instigate and lead the initial charge. Corporate leadership will convince the decision-makers of digital transformation’s value. Financial leadership provides investment and research of how the process affects the bottom line. Operations & engineering can identify areas for improvement and innovation. All the above are needed to motivate the middle group, which will drive real change while the bottom third follows along. This creates company-wide buy-in for real change to be made and stick.
References:
- Motivating the Middle: Fighting Apathy in College Student Organizations by T.J. Sullivan, 2011.
- “Who is Leading Your Industrial Digital Transformation” by Rockwell Automation, 2021.
