How to make sure your next digital transformation is successful

Over the last two decades, almost every large company will have embarked on a digital transformation journey. These chiefly aimed to establish an accurate overall view of all of the organisation’s financial transactions, across all departments, and to then optimise workflows and resources through data-led decision making.  

These transformations have historically been focused on organising financial data. Obtaining rigour and controlling the detail in this area is clearly critically important for any business.  

But, as most organisations can attest, this isn’t as simple as installing some new software and switching it on. Estimates vary, but a widely cited statistic from Boston Consulting Group suggests around 70% of digital transformation projects failed to achieve their initial goals. Most of the companies involved will have gone on to achieve success, but they initially wasted time and money by pursuing projects the wrong way. 

Digital transformation mark 2: Managing energy transition 

Understanding and learning from these failures is important, because it will help leaders and their organisations do better and improve their success in their next digital transformation, which will focus on energy, resources and emissions management.  

As climate risks intensify, along with new opportunities from renewables, and as regulation demands ever more stringent reporting, a new, whole-company approach to gathering data, understanding impacts and implementing changes is required.  

This new wave of transformation is inevitable, and leading companies are already making significant progress. And time is of the essence: while it took two decades to get the first, financial wave of digital transformation right, energy transition is required now, with strict regulations already in place, and more arriving imminently. There is no margin to repeat the mistakes of the past. 

Why projects failed in generation one of digital transformation 

• Cultural failure: Many people have a resistance to change, and cling to old and trusted practices even as they become outdated. Transformation projects need to prove their necessity and value quickly, and to clearly make a positive difference to financial results and individual productivity. Equally, employees need robust support to adapt to new digital tools and processes, or adoption rates will stay low. 
  
  
• Lack of vision: Many organisations launch digital initiatives without a well-defined purpose. Because everyone else is doing it. Instead of aligning transformation with business goals (e.g. revenue growth, customer experience, sustainability), they adopt technology for its own sake. This results in fragmented efforts and wasted investment. 
  
  
• Inflexible solutions: Many powerful software options exist, but some of them are very prescriptive in terms of the rest of a company’s technology stack. They require inputs in very specific formats that have required unwelcome and irrelevant changes to fundamental business operations, creating issues and adding costs. 
  
  
• DIY, or rather, don’t: Sometimes companies decided their business was so unique that it required a solution that didn’t exist in the IT ecosystem, so they needed to make their own. These efforts were often unsuccessful: external experts have implemented thousands of digital transformation projects, and worked out every complication. For internal teams, it is almost always their first time. 
  
  
• IT ownership: Perhaps because they were labelled ‘digital’ transformation projects, many initial efforts were assigned to IT departments. But the transformation required is a whole business venture, affecting every department, every process and every employee. The decisions made for successful implementation require a holistic view of the business from the whole leadership team, with executives’ personal investment throughout. 
  
  
• Change in silos: Each department in a business might have its own view on what’s needed for transformation. There’s some merit in this: no-one knows a department’s details like the people who work there. But take this too far and the result is multiple discrete systems that aren’t able to talk to one another, which is entirely counter to the whole idea of a united, managed view. 
  
  
• Too much change: Digital transformation can and should be exactly that: transformational. But trying to do that all at once can be a bad mistake. New systems take time to understand and optimise. If multiple systems are changing at once, that can take longer and it can be much harder to identify issues. 
  
  

What to look for in your energy transition partner 

Most companies aren’t starting their energy transition from nowhere. They have existing systems in place, and will have invested in some forms of energy measurement and management, and perhaps have existing assets, such as solar panels or building management systems. An ideal partner will be able to meet you where you are, pick up and connect to existing systems and assets, rather than forcing a reset, and wasted investment. The ideal partner will offer comprehensive measurement and control across all your existing assets, regardless of who created them. 

Second, try to find a partner that can continue to work with you across your transition. Your initial efforts might focus on a single area, such as managing building systems. But your ambition might be much more extensive and your partner needs to be able to support future efforts and changes, not just those that exist on day one. Just as you need them to adapt to your existing assets, be sure to choose a partner that will not constrain your future direction or choice of suppliers.  

Next, ensure that your chosen partner can tackle the whole chain of energy consumption, creation and storage. Some providers will ultimately depend on energy bills and hand-submitted readings, rather than being able to collect, analyse and control your estate down to the level of individual devices at multiple remote sites. The volume and complexity of data this creates and the calculations between them will be too much for a system that is ultimately a glorified spreadsheet. Look for platforms that apply AI for Energy to tackle the complexity, like EnOS™.  

Finally, look for specialists in this space. Some potential providers may have broad experience in major IT projects or the previous wave of digital transformation. This does not make them experts in energy transition, which has very different requirements that span across extremely diverse office, industrial and operational technologies, along with multiple regulatory frameworks. Univers has worked with hundreds of companies to implement complex energy projects, some of which you can read about on our customer stories pages. 

image credit: Photo by Michael Held on Unsplash