Creating your company's digital transformation road map

Ryan Pickering, experienced manager at Baker Tilly, opened his presentation at the 2021 Sage Transform conference with a startling statistic: 70% of all digital transformation projects fail to meet stated goals. The reasons for failure range from lack of executive support and misunderstandings about the scope of the project to active resistance from employees tasked with doing extra work.

And yet, digital transformation, which allows companies to make decisions based on data rather than on opinion, is critical in today’s highly competitive business world. Developing a “road map” to keep digital transformations on track is essential for success.

The road map reflects the goals of the transformation, the timeline of the project and who is expected to complete the various steps. The approach helps prevent misunderstandings and has proven very successful as the team has completed more than 900 implementations, transforming client organizations into digital powerhouses.

Building a road map while avoiding the potholes

While the speaker cautioned that putting together a road map will not be enough to solve all the challenges that come up during a digital implementation, a road map helps major stakeholders understand the objectives, outline how available resources are allocated and coach employees about how to complete their “day jobs” while fulfilling additional transformation duties. Each road map will look different, depending on the scope and difficulty of the transformational project.

As a first step, the speaker suggested transformation teams consider how to avoid the “most common” technology transformation pitfalls that arise:

1. Lack of strategic alignment between partners and clients: This occurs when stakeholders have different visions of what success looks like. Careful documentation of project goals brings to light the mismatches between the vision and reality.

2. An “all or nothing” mentality: If the client expects to see improvements and return-on-investment as soon as the new technology goes live, disappointment is almost guaranteed. Make sure the road map gives clients a realistic view of when to expect notable gains.