Transforming organization and culture to scale digital

For implementing digital in any Bank/Financial Industry/organization, there has to be shift in the organization culture. Leaders in every department have to move out of the comfortable glass door and understand the journeys to be undertaken at every level in the organization – be it operational/business/strategic and how the journeys impact the customer/internal staff/external stakeholder. This understanding at the ground level will help build the digital strategy for the organization involving all the staff and decision makers and influencers.

Most of the organizations envisage and implement digital strategy without understanding the vibes within it. Unaware of the maturity of the members of the organization, the activity is likely to fail at the start or during the course of the journey. Strategizing and executing a digital strategy varies from organization to organization – the ideas and solutions implemented in one organization need not be successful in the second organization. The strategy and successful execution for a digital uplift depends on the people, maturity of business process, timing, and business problems among other factors.

People are key to any organization and any change without full support from all the stakeholders is bound to fail – involving all departments and all people from top to bottom. People in any organization belong to different age groups – youngsters, middle age, older people and any execution largely depends on the adoption of any change within the different age group segments. Another important aspect with the people is the communication and effectiveness of the same enabling reach at all the levels. The type of communication to the different levels at the initiating stage, intermediate stage and every execution stage is critical for success. Additionally, review and progress at each stage is required to drive success.

The organization culture and the process maturity within the digital realm needs to be aligned at an early stage. A platform and tectonic shift towards a digital world from a nascent process may not be an acceptance norm in the organization. It may not be easy to adapt to substantial changes when the digital and process maturity is at a low level. It is required to have gradual changes and defined roadmap towards digital maturity.

Timing is very important for any organization to move to digital. The digital models one organization adopts successfully may not be as successful in a different organization at a different time and in a different context. The timing depends on the launch and the business issue at a particular point of time. The digital technologies and processes undergo major changes in brief periods and accelerate with high speed automation, and timing is of essence in driving this change.

In any organization, there is a business pain point or issue which gets addressed through digitalization and automation. The issues crop up at unique levels with different maturity processes and patterns as per the organization history. These may have been managed earlier in significantly different ways. For a successful digital adoption, people should be open to change and should be able to solve the business pain points of the institution – be it customer facing or inward / internal facing. The business pain points could be multidimensional and may have

a)    Problems in existing operations and processes

b)    Problems in launching new operations and processes

c)    Problems in new business innovations

d)    Problems in automation

e)    Problems in data generation and reporting

f)     Problems in analytics

g)    Problems in business models etc.

h)    Outdated technologies

These pain points/issues could be an offshoot of the market /regulatory /technology changes which have occurred over a period of time. A digital identity of the organization can be planned with an aggregation of the pain points organization faces today and is likely to face in the future.

The classic example of a successful digital transformation is a bank in South East Asia operating in India wherein digitalization has increased the value for each customer relationship, lowered costs and enhanced transaction volumes.

To conclude, digital transformation in an organization can be achieved by involving all the stakeholders of the organization, and business success depends on process maturity, digital maturity, people maturity and organization maturity. If the maturity levels are low in any one dimension within the organization, the exercise is likely to come to naught. Digital transformation may have some immediate success and impact but may not result in the desired outcome or scale envisaged by the organization in the absence of adequate maturity. A good digital strategy imbibed into the organization culture can improve employee performance, increase operational efficiency, streamline operations and can enhance customer experience.