Don’t Set Your Digital Transformation Journey Up to Fail

In Tony Saldanha’s book, “Why Digital Transformations Fail,” he wrote a small but enormous story about Amy Ingram, who he thought was a personal assistant. The “Aha!” moment in this small story highlights why re-thinking technology and investing in change is urgent. Amy Ingram was an AI robot! Amy was indeed a personal assistant, and she was responding to emails intelligently and moving along with meeting scheduling. Tony hadn’t considered that Amy wasn’t human. 

“What does Amy, the Personal Assistant robot, do with Digital Transformation failure? – The answer is Speed.”

Technology is quickly changing all around us. Just think, the guy you see sitting at a laptop in a cafe could be writing code that will revolutionize how coffee farmers adapt to climate change. He could be making significant improvements to supply chains or the operations at a large multinational. Disruption is happening all around us; change happens fast. If your business is waiting for the right time to upgrade existing technology — trying to maximize using an outdated technology stack — you’re losing out on digital experience game already.

Analogies can be annoying, but since diets are popular, hopefully, this is relatable. Can you imagine having a kitchen full of foods that you now know are largely unhealthy, are aggravating your health problems, and are preventing you from achieving optimum health - but instead of ridding your kitchen of them, you plan to ‘use them up’ before replacing them with healthy ones? If you do this, you are willing to sacrifice your health, possibly your happiness, and your goals – to save yourself from wasting the food in your cupboards because you’ve already wasted money on these self-defeating foods.

You can see the logic. But compare that to the reason of immediately removing the obstacles and replacing them with new sources of nutrition that will immediately begin improving your health to help you to achieve your goals. Why waste more time and money on something that will not deliver the results you want?

Nourish Your Organization's Innovation Plans with Some Actions on The Ground

Staying on outdated technologies that can’t deliver the required or wanted results are exactly what many businesses do. It might make sense for the depreciation of assets, but it probably doesn’t make sense in revenue or profit.

The problem many businesses face is looking at programs and projects that are mighty and highly transformative. And that view can’t help but slow down the process of change. And when change is happening fast and is unpredictable in markets facing disruption, it is highly valuable to make fast incremental change. Your digital transformation roadmap will keep becoming more precise if you adopt new technologies, put them into play, and demonstrate value in delivering an impeccable digital experience. It will also become more evident that competitive advantage is the ability to adapt your marketing technology stack to changes.

Now Let Me Tell You Why “Composability” Matters 

Moving to modern marketing and sales technologies takes time and money. You need to be able to move and change as the market does. You might even want to get ahead of the curve. You don’t want to get stuck architecting and negotiating a project that will take more than a year to complete when you can start delivering results in a couple of months.

Why Composability Is the Most Powerful Factor

Composability means you can take pieces of digital technology and put them together to form your digital experience platform. And you can add to it. Imagine a lego block is your CRM. To improve your understanding of the customer, you determine that the next best technology addition is a Customer Data Platform, followed by Digital Asset Management, ecommerce, improved Search, etc. Composability enables you to roadmap how you build a Digital Experience Platform by road-mapping how you will transform and roll out new capabilities.

It’s Long Past Time to Change the Conversation

Composable technology isn’t just faster and smarter - it’s often a path of less resistance. It’s easier to get internal buy-in and approvals when the duration of projects is shorter, and the time need to demonstrate value or ROI is shorter.

It's critical for businesses to ensure they are maximizing the true potential of composability in their DX journey. These needs broadening our horizon and moving away from narrowly focused efforts. Learn more about our digital transformation services that help drive long-term and sustainable success for your organization.