Some Digital Transformations Are Doomed Before They Start
Cornelius Giblin
Senior Leader: Organizational Change Management & Digital Transformation ⇨ Best-in-Class Strategies for Employee Productivity, Performance Improvement & Customer Experience
At the outset, let me share a key assumption: A successful digital transformation (DT) includes two distinct but synchronized efforts:
This article focuses on business operations transformation.
Readiness
The old change management guru Johnny Carson once said, “Talent alone won’t make you a success. Neither will being in the right place at the right time unless you are ready.” When it comes to digital transformations, the answer to whether organizations are ready is often a resounding NO!
When operations employees are not ready to support the digital transformation, two troubling trends emerge:
This performance drop forces managers into firefighting mode, diverting them from leading change. At that point, it’s often too late to improve current processes and functions that could have helped maintain acceptable performance levels. The downward spiral continues, and failure becomes increasingly inevitable. The preventative is preparation.
Preparation
The Boy Scouts are right: "Be Prepared." Preparation takes time, resources, and focus. If business operations leaders act as soon as enterprise leadership signals interest in a new ERP or DT investment, they typically have a window of three months or more before the project kickoff. This is the time to prepare.
The critical question for operations leaders regarding preparation becomes: What needs to be done to ensure operational readiness? The answer lies in mastering the fundamentals.
Fundamentals: The Key to Operational Readiness
Golf legend Ben Hogan’s book, Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf (1957), offers insights applicable far beyond sports. Hogan defined fundamentals as essential observable, physical actions that can be practiced and improved. The primary goal, Hogan says, is to develop a “correct, powerful, repeating swing.”
Similarly, business operations have fundamentals that must be clearly defined, practiced, and refined to ensure superior repeating execution. Business operations fundamentals are management and support processes and capabilities used across operations. In the context of digital transformations, this means using best practices and achieving standardized current state performance regardless of stress or change.
The Role of Operations Fundamentals in DT
DT development and implementation tend to pull current state things apart and slow current state things down. High-performing operations fundamentals are the glue that holds things together and the lubricant that eliminates friction, leakage, and inhibitors.
There are a lot of business operations fundamentals, way more than a golf swing. The first task for operations leaders is to identify the ones that will benefit the DT most, then determine which of them require attention and that is only the beginning—the hardest question to answer is... how much improvement is enough?
These are thirteen business operations fundamentals that are among the most impactful categorized by thematic area:
Operations Capabilities
1. Message cascading
2. Boundary spanning, transparency and permeability
3. Vendor and other 3rd party interactions
People Management
Recommended by LinkedIn
4. Performance feedback
5. Management style
6. Work time utilization
7. Chain of command efficacy
Vertical and Horizontal Working Relationships
8. Rapport building
9. Communication channels
10. Information sharing on the horizontal
Collaboration with Information Technology
11. Project governance
12. Business process redesign
13. Dashboard and reporting
The Problem with Operations Fundamentals
During business-as-usual (BAU) periods, many enterprises overlook operational fundamentals because they are taken for granted. However, these fundamentals can suddenly become critical contributors during a transformation, and dysfunction and flaws become glaring under stress. What could have been predictable risks instead become emergent crises, creating confusion just when clarity and shared understanding are essential.
Obviously, organizations that always maintain high-performing fundamentals during BAU are far better equipped to meet the demands of transformation without fear of being blindsided by operational breakdowns.
Poor Performing Operations Fundamentals Are Not ‘Resistance’
The most overused and misconstrued term we use is ‘resistance’. Bad fundamentals sometimes fall under the general heading of resistance which suggests that employees are resisting when operations leadership should get the credit.
Looking back, I’ve seen few instances where well informed, prepared, and fairly treated employees resisted anything. Which begs the question, are employees to blame for being uninformed, ill-prepared, and left feeling like they are being asked to do more with less? We will wrestle with that question another day.
A Case in Point: Message Cascading
One fundamental that often causes problems is message cascading. Cascading means the message is delivered by a person who can provide additional explanation and answer questions in real time for the person who receives the message. Middle managers frequently believe their organizations can effectively relay accurate information from the C-suite to line employees—that belief often goes up in smoke once it is tested. If critical messages from leadership don’t reach frontline employees, confusion spreads, and the project suffers.
OCM teams may scramble to fix the problem while the project is already underway—a reactive approach that introduces additional distress and increases the risk of failure.
Conclusion
Even brilliant, experienced leaders—familiar with process maturity, systems thinking, and the pitfalls of the Dunning-Kruger effect—can overlook operational readiness. An article could be written about why that happens, but it’s more helpful to focus on what preparation should be done, when it should happen and why it matters.
Digital transformations often fail because organizations underestimate the importance of operations fundamentals. A successful transformation requires more than strategy or technical solutions; it demands a foundation of correct, powerful, repeating fundamentals across business operations—the heart of the organization. The difference between failure and success depends on foresight that prompts action before it’s too late.