I was hoping for a magic pill, but was given exercises instead. To repair or heal my injured shoulder I need to do certain exercises for 8-12 weeks. 6 days a week for 8-12 weeks, no magic pill, just consistent exercises. I’m glad surgery isn’t required at the moment, but I think secretly I was hoping for a quick fix.
It reminds me of most conversations I have about digital transformation. Most organisations, teams, most of us really are hoping for an app we can download and use. Easy pesy. Bish bash bosh. Done. And yet, this is almost never reality. We can download apps to register people, collect data about people and so on. However, what data to collect is up to us. We tend to need to load in the questions, we need to also think about where the data goes from the collect device, when it’s deleted and so on.
There is ‘setup’ required.
And if there are pre-installed templates, this may seem great, but they can be a pain. In one app, the pre-installed template included a few pieces of data classified as mandatory that we didn’t need. The app wouldn’t let us not collect the data, we needed the template changed or the mandatory-ness of the data field to overriden. Months later we were still struggling with the same issue.
And there are also challenges when multiple organisations are involved. Downloading an app is the easy part. Agreeing on what data to collect, which questions to ask, which data needs to be shared, what does not. All these things take discussions, time, and then consistent implementation.
Digital transformation does not come with a ‘magic pill’ we can download from the app store. It is not a quick fix for management issues. Sometimes it actually makes it ‘worse’ because it highlights the lack of decisions or agreement on what to collect and how to use it. Digital transformation can be successful though through consistent discussions, decisions, and implementation.
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