For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
—H. L. Mencken (1920)
Why start the final part of this book with a statement written around 90 years before digital transformation even existed? Well, only to make it clear what this concluding chapter is and what it cannot and certainly will not be: a simple answer.
If you were hoping to jump straight to the easy‐to‐implement conclusion (or consuming some 10‐minute summary via an AI‐enabled app), I have to destroy your illusion right away: Despite what some managers, executives, shareholders, and even employees seem to believe, experience and the underlying deep research of this book show that just surfing on the hype and buzzwords, and copy–pasting a few concepts and recipes from new so‐called best‐practice examples that are churned out of the digital‐transformation ecosystem on a daily basis, is the most likely common denominator of any failed digital transformation effort.
Instead, I strongly believe that for you to be able to succeed, you must pay utmost attention to all elements and all relevant accelerators and decelerators of your digital transformation journey in great detail and see them end to end across all interacting elements. There has never been such a thing as a value‐generating business transformation without a clear winning strategy, endurance, patience, strong resilience to setbacks, and an eye for the detail and manifold complex interdependencies. As I hope I have demonstrated in this book, just adding digital as another component (or, even worse, as a “digital strategy” buzzword) does not change anything in this eternal truth. Instead, the age of digital often makes things even more challenging as many more potential and heavily interacting accelerators and decelerators for your payday are added to the equation. Therefore, while simplicity can and often should be an outcome of your digital transformation journey, if your strategy rightly aims for it as a key ingredient for winning, the transformation toward this goal usually makes things much more complex at first.
To make things even more challenging: There is no such thing as a single plannable digital transformation payday. Our framework shows that dependency flows in all directions for a good reason. Remember what we said in our framework description in Chapter 3:
All elements can and will influence each other in many directions. This means that not only a multitude of catalysts driving your transformation all at the same time can define which scope … is affected most, but also in return the transformation scope can define which catalysts (for example, digital technologies) have the highest importance for the digital transformation process … The same is also true for the value backflow from digital transformation outcomes, which in return can influence all … elements before them, depending on the actual impact achieved … even though the described elements do not necessarily always create direct outcomes, they can and often will.
So, the journey to your digital transformation payday in real‐life is not a sequential process after all, but rather an interaction of complex multidirectional digital transformation payday loops. If you succeed in designing your digital transformation journey across all the necessary elements, and do it in a way so the accelerators ultimately dominate the decelerators, you should be able to speed up not only your next payday, but also build a virtuous cycle so that the paydays keep coming.
Even though there are no simple answers, there are still a few things you need to consider when embarking on a journey to your digital transformation payday: On your way, you will navigate the hype, lower the risks, and increase your return on investment. Table C.1 summarizes these in a high‐level checklist.
We are done, are we not? Well, not really. We never are.
TABLE C.1 Digital Transformation Payday “checklist.”
Topic | Considerations |
Digital Transformation Payday |
|
Design/strategy |
|
Catalysts/drivers |
|
Reactants/scope |
|
Reaction mechanism/process |
|
Product/outcomes |
|
Predictors |
|
While this book had digital transformations in mind, it is also applicable to any (disruptive) technology‐driven transformation. Most likely, the world already is progressing or will soon move to the next stage of development. It is believed to quickly evolve “beyond digital,” where so‐called “exponentials” (intelligent processes, integrated reality, new energy matrix, digital governance, bioprogramming and neurogamification) make digital transformation look “boring” (Rodriguez‐Ramos 2018, pp. 1–9) in comparison.
But that is a different story and maybe worth another book.