Business leaders are acutely aware of the need for new business technologies to fuel long-term growth and viability and remain competitive in a saturated marketplace. However, around 84% of digital transformation projects fail due to an overwhelming lack of oversight. From bad planning and budgeting to misinterpreting requirements or underestimating the sheer scope of new business tech required – these avoidable issues can gravely impact digital transformation initiatives and your overall business outlook.
Unfortunately, organisations can no longer afford to go through the motions of onboarding new business technologies blindly and waste resources along the way. In this blog, we uncover the six big oversights when onboarding new business technologies so you can avoid them altogether and ensure a successful implementation.
1. Not assessing the performance of current tech stacks
It’s hard to know exactly what your organisation needs from any new business technologies without first assessing your current tech stack and its performance. Assessing your existing technologies prior to adoption may seem like a no-brainer, however, many organisations still rush into implementations prematurely and run the risk of making a bad investment and onboarding an ineffective system. By conducting a discovery audit of your current technology ecosystem and examining both the business problem and the end-user problem, you can get a better sense of the current gaps that need to be filled and devise a plan for a long-term solution.
2. Only looking at your internal organisation
While looking inward to understand how your organisation's existing technologies are currently servicing your requirements is important, it’s equally essential to check out what your competitors are up to. A competitor analysis can give you useful insights into the way your wider industry is behaving while helping to establish benchmarks to use as a reference point for measuring your growth against other companies. From there, you can use your innovative flair to come up with creative ways to go one step further and outshine your competition.
3. Lack of goal setting
It’s fundamental that your team clearly defines the goal of your new business technology. This will inform your unique business requirements, giving you a clearer view of how to meet them and the solutions needed to deliver sustainable and scalable value. This is critical now more than ever with changing customer needs and evolving business demands. Goal setting lets you connect the dots between business needs, technical requirements, and customer satisfaction. Without adequate goal setting, the controls and processes around your new tech implementation are likely to be ill-informed and fail to deliver your requirements.
4. Not aligning people, processes and technologies
To ensure your new business technology has the desired outcome, whether it be increased productivity, flexibility or efficiency, there must be alignment between your people, processes and the technology itself. This includes clearly communicating your overall business vision with staff, conducting training and team upskilling, nurturing a collaborative environment, engaging your people on the ground who will be using the new systems, ensuring your staff’s opinions are heard and incorporated, and documenting how your new tech fits into new or existing processes.
5. Having no way of measuring performance
Establishing deadlines, deliverables and key performance indicators (KPIs) is critical to the success of your project. Without this, you have no visibility over how well your implementation is tracking. Measuring the progress and performance of your new technologies will help determine if you’re meeting your requirements, allowing you to make changes and reorient your project if you find you’ve gone off-track. Additionally, this can set your organisation up with a feedback loop so you can measure the ongoing performance of your tech thereafter, allowing you to scale accordingly.
6. Being fearful of automation
In some cases, businesses or even individual employees are afraid of automation because they see it as a threat to their jobs rather than a job enhancer. What they fail to recognise is that unautomated, manual processes can lead to inconsistencies and uncertainty, especially when you’re implementing multiple, disjointed systems. On the other hand, forward-thinking organisations understand that digital transformation projects or new tech implementations that adopt automation consistently generate value. This is because they allow you to adaptively manage and deploy changes as needed which is a vital capability in the fast-paced business world. With the right automation solution for your organisation, you can streamline workflows, increase flexibility and efficiency, reduce errors, and even lower business costs throughout your implementation project.
Of course, there is no cookie-cutter approach to finding the perfect new business technologies for your organisation. However, avoiding these six big oversights will help minimise the risk of implementation failure while setting you on a smoother path towards a positive return on investment and ongoing growth and profitability for your organisation.
Rapid changes in the workplace and acceleration in the adoption of digital technologies have fast-tracked the future of work. It's time to act now and prepare your business for the future. Download our Workplaces of the Future ebook to learn more.
