One quarter of companies failing in their digital transformation and only 4% reach their targets

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ONE quarter of companies are failing in digital transformation, a leading conference of business leaders organised out of Limerick has heard.

The inaugural Irish Centre for Business Excellence (ICBE) ‘Digital Productivity Virtual Summit’ heard that success rates for transformation in the digital space have dropped considerably from other areas of change over the past 15 years. The event heard that digital transformation is the biggest “change” that business has faced and that it has been accelerated many times by COVID.

The summit is the first in a series of such conferences that will build up to a global ‘Digital Transformation’ gatherings hosted by the ICEB, which was founded and is based in Limerick, in 2027 as part of events around the Ryder Cup, which will be hosted in Adare in six years’ time.

Opening the event, Laurent-Pierre Baculard, who leads Bain & Company’s Digital Transformation practice in EMEA from its Paris office, said that the experience of the past 15 years is that some 16 percent of organisations achieve or exceed initial objectives for change. However, the success rate for full digital transformation is as low as 4%, with as many as 25% failing, he said.

He said that change in a company is inevitable and companies have to progress, often without knowing where they are going in terms of technology.  Mr Baculard also highlighted the focus of millennial job seekers, who want to be inspired, engaged and satisfied with their work.

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Some 74% want to feel like their work matters, 52% rate culture as very important when thinking about employers and 64% believe they need additional skills and knowledge to thrive.

The conference also heard from representatives of Dell and Sprinklr about their digital transformation customer engagement partnership. Sprinklr, the world’s leading customer experience management platform, works with 900 of the world’s top 1,000 companies and, among others, helped transform Dell’s customer engagement.

Murali Krishnan, Senior Vice President – Customer Delight with Sprinklr, said that its platform made a huge impact on Dell’s customer engagement, in terms of customer satisfaction, customer resolution, turn-around times and more.

He said that people born from the mid ‘60s to the early part of the last decade – generations X, Y and Z – are adopting the web and social media channels to interact with brands.

“This is the way that the whole world is changing and with COVID, it’s accelerated many, many times. This is why it’s important to realise that most organisations, while they want to embrace digital, don’t know how to go about doing it.”

Meanwhile, Chairman of the ICBE Kieran Noonan – Site Director of Operations and Global Lens Enterprise Excellence at Bausch + Lomb and Shingo Executive Board Member – said that the digital transformation underway is the biggest “version of change” that industry has experienced today.

There is, he said, a lot of trepidation in terms of where digital transformation takes us but the Summit gave comfort that digital transformation is very similar to the Lean transformations that has been embraced over the years.

“There’s a common theme through all of this and it is that it still centres around people and the development of people, things that we are well used to such as leadership, people, system, tools, behaviours and it really centres and focuses on that first piece with leadership,” he said.

Mr Noonan, who is also Enterprise Excellence Shingo Examiner at the Shingo Institute, said that the Summit had raised not just awareness of the data transformation but the “direction we all need to follow to ensure we are ready and leading the way forward”.

He continued: “But we have a consistent theme, as we have mentioned all the way through this Summit and we have got experience in that, and it’s called ‘implementing change’.  

This is a new version of change and a bigger version of change than what we have seen before but the principles will still be the same. The power of ICBE is its ability to harness knowledge sharing, collaboration and collective growth between its members.”

This week’s summit follows on from a peer-group gathering of Irish leads of some of the largest multi-nationals operating here last November which explored the ‘New World of Work’, how COVID-19 has been impacting on the way we work and how the digital transformation will be an enabler to meet and overcome residual challenges from it in the years ahead.

The summit explored key insights into the world of Digital Productivity and Transformation, with speakers from global organisations sharing their experiences of utilising cloud computing, app development and agile thinking to improve collaboration and productivity.

Speakers included Richard Seroter, Director, Google Cloud; Mark Gallagher, Managing Director, Formula 1/Performance Insights; Laurent-Pierre Baculard, Senior Partner, Bain & Company; Richard Fitzgerald, Global Head of Social Supports, Dell Technologies. For full speaker line up please click http://digitalproductivitysummit.com/

 

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