ผู้นำและการเปลี่ยนแปลงทางดิจิทัล
CEO และการเปลี่ยนแปลงทางดิจิทัล
ปัญหาสำหรับธุรกิจที่ต้องการให้เกิด การเปลี่ยนแปลงทางดิจิทัล (digital transformations) คือ หากไม่มีความมุ่งมั่นและกระตือรือร้นของ CEO ก็แทบจะไม่มีโอกาสประสบความสำเร็จ
เป็นเพราะว่า การเปลี่ยนแปลงทางดิจิทัล คือการสร้างโมเดลธุรกิจขึ้นมาใหม่ ซึ่งต้องใช้ฟังก์ชันต่างๆ ทั่วทั้งองค์กร เพื่อทำงานร่วมกันในรูปแบบใหม่ และสามารถเกิดขึ้นได้ผ่านการลงทุนขนาดใหญ่ เพื่อสร้างสมรรถนะใหม่ทั้งหมด
บุคคลเดียว ที่สามารถทำให้เกิดการเปลี่ยนแปลงอย่างยั่งยืนในระดับนั้น คือ CEO
The CEO is ultimately the only one who can shape and guide a successful digital transformation.
2. December 20, 2021 | Article
By Eric Lamarre, Kate Smaje, and Rodney Zemmel
From: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights
The CEO is ultimately the only one who can shape and guide a successful digital transformation.
10. June 21, 2021 | Executive Briefing
By Celia Huber, Alex Sukharevsky, and Rodney Zemmel
From: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights
Boards can add value to their business’s digital transformation in five specific areas.
18. January 29, 2021 | Article
By Matt Fitzpatrick and Kurt Strovink
From: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights
As organizations launch more and more digital initiatives, CEOs must monitor whether they are
delivering business results.
The CEO is ultimately the only one who can shape and guide a successful digital transformation.
An inconvenient truth for businesses undertaking digital transformations is that without focused and active CEO commitment, there is almost no chance of success.
That’s because a digital transformation is a business-model reinvention that requires different functions across the organization to work together in new ways, and can happen only through large-scale investments in building an entirely new set of capabilities.
The only person who can make that level of sustained change happen is the CEO.
The point of a digital transformation isn’t to become digital; it’s to generate value for the business.
Successful CEOs are able to look past their current business to reimagine where transformative value is possible.
They spend a lot of time visiting companies and keeping up with trends and emerging business models. That helps them see what’s possible and look at their own assets with fresh eyes.
In tandem with the company’s top team, the successful CEO works through all the most important elements of a transformation at the domain level—talent, tech and data, operations—to produce a detailed road map for action.
Successful CEOs help their organization address the role of corporate culture and purpose in attracting and keeping exceptional talent.
While money is important, those with top digital skills also want to hone their craft on cutting-edge technology and solve problems they perceive as meaningful.
The CEO can drive changes in the company’s culture and processes to appeal to them, work with the CHRO to create flexible career pathways where they can grow their skills and progress professionally, and—perhaps most crucial—develop and communicate the company’s higher purpose.
Digital CEOs recognize that data and technology are core competitive differentiators, and they run their business that way.
The most successful CEOs prioritize tech and data in two ways.
First, they obsess about how to apply tech and data to solving business problems or finding new opportunities.
Second, they make organizational changes to ensure tech and data are embedded in the business.
CEOs shouldn’t tolerate a structure where “the business” sets requirements on which IT must deliver. Rather, they should follow the lead of successful digital companies and develop an operating model where technology and business collaborate on developing and delivering digital products and services.
Speed matters in digital, and the CEO can set the tempo in many ways, such as through more frequent allocations (of talent and funding, for example) and reviews of progress against the road maps.
The best-performing companies, in fact, review data, share findings, and reallocate talent more often than their peers.
But the most challenging CEO task is fomenting a culture that values doers and small teams of top people. (A small team of exceptional people working in agile ways delivers significantly more impact than an army of average talent.)
Making digital “stick” at scale is challenging because of the knock-on effects, which require the business to continually recalibrate and realign to capture all the available value, something only the CEO can do.
A rule of thumb is that for every dollar spent on digital, another dollar should be spent on adoption.
One mistake CEOs make is that they address adoption and scaling issues only well after the digital transformation has begun. Successful CEOs, in contrast, are as passionate about adoption as they are about strategy.
Boards can add value to their business’s digital transformation in five specific areas.
Few board directors would dispute the importance of digital and how it’s fundamentally reshaping the competitive landscape in almost every sector.
What is emerging is a model where the core mandate of the board is unchanged but its scope for intervention on issues such as risk and competition is expanding.
The complexity and speed of change in digital and technology can make it difficult for board directors to focus on technology as a crucial strategic priority that can unlock new revenue and competitive advantage. The goal for the board isn’t to understand the technology but, rather, to understand its implications.
One way to address this issue is to bring on new board members whose experience aligns with the business’s strategic priorities. If e-commerce is crucial, find a board member with that experience and expertise. If it’s supply-chain digitization, then a different profile with that background is needed.
Digital transformations aren’t about being digital; they’re about creating value. That aligns with the board’s most important mandate, and the board can be particularly helpful in assessing value across three vectors:
Scale. The typical aspirations of digital transformations often lead to changes at the margins (5–10 percent increases over the previous year).
Source. Technology is often an efficiency conversation about cost savings. But the greater value of tech is in its ability to build value.
Scope. Short-term pressures can overtake any business, especially when the market is volatile. Digital transformations, however, require long-term commitments to reap the full rewards they can deliver.
Almost every business has embarked on some kind of digital transformation, but for all the activity, it can be hard to know if it’s working (or, more often, why it isn’t working). That’s because, while board members generally have some kind of dashboard to review, the metrics don’t help show whether “digital” is happening.
For example, one key metric is the speed with which new ideas are translated into frontline tools. Another is the percentage of talent that’s actually working in agile teams where true change occurs.
Boards are often intimately involved in hiring C-suite leaders, but executive hires aren’t always the most important ones.
Boards don’t need to be involved in hiring data engineers, product managers, and scrum coaches—among many others—but they need to engage with senior leadership on progress made in developing this digital talent bench.
Because few companies will be able to “hire their way to victory,” upgrading existing talent must be a core pillar of the business’s program.
Boards have traditionally provided guidance on how to navigate emerging threats to the business landscape, but digital has radically shifted where threats come from and how quickly they emerge. While cybersecurity is now a top board agenda item, local compliance or national security laws, for example, have created risks when businesses have their servers located in these corresponding locations.
Similarly, boards will need to expand their view of where threats exist as digital businesses migrate into new sectors. Think about e-commerce businesses getting into data management, tech companies moving into banking, or retailers into logistics.
Boards can help press executive teams to look for “analog threats” rather than direct competitors and to inject more creativity into scenario-planning exercises.
As organizations launch more and more digital initiatives, CEOs must monitor whether they are delivering business results.
In a time of seemingly nonstop digital disruptions, which have only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, the business imperative to embrace digital, data, and analytics is widely understood. The link to business value, however, is not.
While business and technology leaders might report good progress on those initiatives to the CEO, simply getting projects off the drawing board doesn’t guarantee that the organization is increasing revenue, profitability, market share, efficiency, or competitive moats as a result.
The cross-organizational metrics offer CEOs a holistic view of strides made toward company-wide digital transformation.
Prioritizing digital initiatives is an essential first step we’ve written about frequently, but it’s worth repeating—and it falls directly on the CEO’s shoulders.
CEOs should ask themselves today, “Does my organization have a clear road map of digital priorities, rather than a basket of digital projects?”
The purpose of this road map is not just to get from point A to point B. It’s to force the organization to prioritize three to five bold initiatives, meaning digital moves that have potential to make a material difference in the organization’s overall performance, and to focus resources accordingly.
When implementation of the prioritized digital road map has begun, it is time to start measuring performance. Given the scale and complexity of digital transformation, measurement is critical to ensure that all the expense and effort of digital investment are paying off with improved performance. CEOs should monitor five broad markers to assess the organization’s digital progress accurately.
1. Return on digital investments
2. Percentage of annual technology budget spent on bold digital initiatives
3. Time required to build a digital application
4. Percentage of business leaders’ incentives linked to value-creating digital builds
5. Top technical talent attracted, promoted, and retained
Measuring the return on digital investment is both standard and essential.
CEOs should look not only at the value being provided by individual priority digital initiatives but also at initiatives’ collective support of strategic organizational goals.
To maximize returns, we recommend transforming one business domain at a time and broadening from there for traction and coherence. “Domain” here refers to a critical process, customer or employee journey, or function.
Transforming domains one by one allows organizations to leverage similar data sets, technology solutions, and team members for multiple use cases, which ultimately saves time and expense.
Further, the organization must put in place change-management initiatives that encourage adoption of the solutions.
Organizations that spend only a small proportion of their technology budgets on enabling the most strategic, bold digital initiatives are unlikely to maximize return on digital investment. The allocation of technology spend is a leading indicator CEOs can monitor to ensure that the organization is positioned to deliver digital-backed value.
Simply spend so much of their digital budgets on infrastructure and maintenance legacy systems that have grown increasingly complex and outdated may not make sense, due to cost and potential disruption to business processes.
Instead, companies should push for simplification and renewal across the systems that drive the greatest business value.
Speed, specifically the quick translation of ideas into tools that can be used on the front line, is critical in a digital organization. In a fast-changing world, delay means yielding advantage to the competition or, worse, producing a tool that is obsolete before it’s ever used.
Overly long timelines could indicate that the organization is failing to institutionalize best practices, CEOs need to know how long it takes to build applications that actually get used. It’s also useful to measure the percentage of applications built that actually make it to market.
Deployment speed is arguably the most important key performance indicator (KPI) in digital and analytics. It reflects the degree to which all elements of a technology organization are working together, and it determines how quickly data and modeling insights can reach the field to test, learn, and improve.
A CEO needs to ensure that all organizational leaders are accountable for digital transformation and are driving tangible value. Aligning incentives is critical to achieving these ends.
Organizations building out their digital and analytics capabilities will often have multiple technology leaders—chief digital officer and chief information officer, to name two. But next-generation chief technology officer (CTOs), who oversee all product from design to delivery and control all technology development, are keenly focused on agile, rapid delivery.
In the age of technology disruption, the CEO needs to empower and incentivize a CTO mindset of builder and change agent, not merely head of IT. Realigning incentives and changing the mindset to one of value creation can have a massive impact on culture, pace, and business.
The ability to attract and retain exceptional tech talent is arguably the most crucial driver of long-term success in this increasingly digital age.
Tech talent includes individuals with expertise in data engineering and analytics, design and user experience, and core technology. In the early stages, organizations will want to focus more on having enough senior architects and entrepreneurial builders.
To ensure retention, CEOs should look for satisfaction proxies (the rate at which digital talent participates in technical communities or the rate at which they progress on their career paths within the company). Perhaps most important is talent integration. If your tech talent is isolated in a silo, rather than side by side with the business, it is extremely difficult to scale in digital.
Finally, since companies can never hire for all the digital talent needed, it’s also important to measure how well an organization is upskilling existing talent.