Seven signs your digital initiatives may fail
80% of digital initiatives fail to meet their objectives, according to McKinsey. How can you prevent yours being one of them? Inviqa’s digital strategy experts have come up with seven signs that your digital initiatives may fail, and we outline them below.
We encourage our clients to assess their digital maturity using a framework we have developed, before kicking off digital transformation initiatives and investing in new ecommerce and other types of customer-facing digital technology. When completing this assessment, we’ve identified these seven signs as some of the biggest blockers to success for digital initiatives.
Identifying these red flags - and determining ways to overcome them - can be crucial to subsequent digital strategy projects and technology adoption meeting its objectives.
We don’t yet have a digital roadmap
This is one of the most common issues we encounter. The roadmap provides prioritisation for adoption of technology to enable digital transformation. Without this, conflicting priorities can lead to paralysis, as the organisation cannot agree on what needs to happen first, where investment should be directed, and which technology platforms will be right to support subsequent stages of transformation.
Our leadership team doesn’t see digital as key to succeeding in our business goals
Culture comes from the top down. If an organisation’s leadership does not share a vision with digital underpinning its strategy and goals, then it is much less likely that the organisation will be able to move up the digital maturity ladder.
Appropriate investment is much less likely. Technology adoption may address point problems rather than supporting fundamental business strategy, and business processes may not be aligned to maximise the potential of new technology.
Digital innovation is not embraced by all senior leaders in our organisation
A single function championing digital innovation will only get your business so far on its digital transformation journey. The leaders of all key functions – such as sales, marketing, technology and digital need to be aligned in their thinking for digital initiatives to have the best chance of success.
Without this, teams won’t be structured effectively and processes won’t be optimised to fully benefit from digital transformation.
We struggle to collaborate between different functions
Businesses who have had real success with their digital initiatives embrace and support a culture of collaboration. This is necessary to ensure that each department touched by digital and change initiatives is able to input to the project, and taken on a change journey rather than having it forced upon them.
Time must be allowed for effective collaboration, and workloads balanced accordingly, rather than expecting team members to add collaboration as an extra task on top of a full-time role.
Our company culture doesn’t allow for an iterative digital product development process
Going digital isn’t a one-off event. For organisations launching digital services and channels, it may be necessary to start with a minimum viable product (MVP); building on this as the business and end customer become more digitally mature.
An acceptance that innovation and change take time - and may best be achieved in stages - is crucial to initiatives being given realistic goals and achieving against them.
We collect lots of data but don’t make use of it
This is a clear indicator of a lack of digital maturity. It may mean that digital sales or marketing channels are not being effectively measured, which would inform where effort and budget should be focused.
Or it could mean that teams are not able to generate customer insights that could lead to better targeted marketing messages, personalisation and other techniques to deliver stronger relationships and, ultimately, greater lifetime customer value.
We don’t use customer research or data to inform our digital product and service developments
Connected to the above point is that research and data should ideally inform your digital product development strategy and roadmap. This is to ensure that developments have desired impacts on end customers, and so support broader business goals.
If any of the above points resonate with experiences in your own organisation get in touch and Inviqa can take you through our digital maturity assessment to help you prioritise the actions to take and ensure your digital initiatives don’t fail.
