Digital Transformation: Past, Present & Future feat. Didier Bonnet

Mar 2, 2022

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87% of digital transformation initiatives fail to meet expectations. Do we raise expectations too high or is it really a problem of a failure to implement or execute the transformation?

Didier Bonnet joins us today to sort this out. He is a former executive vice president at the consulting firm Capgemini and currently a professor of strategy and digital transformation at IMD Business School. He also co-authored “Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation” and the more recent “Hacking Digital: Best Practices to Implement and Accelerate Your Business Transformation''.

Didier and Greg discuss what the right questions are to ask your executive team, fashionistas, the role of the Chief Digital Officer, as well as digital governance.

Episode Quotes:

What does the future of this work look like:

We're still organizing in pretty traditional ways. And in fact, I really believe, and we're not there yet but that the next wave of digital transformation will probably be much more about organizational innovation than digital innovation. And the reason I'm saying that is because of course the flow of technology will continue to happen.

Engineers and inventors are doing their job of inventing stuff and they're doing a great job. So we'll see this continuous flow of amazing technology coming. But unless we start adapting our organization, it's going to become very hard to work efficiently.

Why do so many transformations fail to meet expectations:

I think one of the problems there is people, the minute they make the investment in the technology, they think the job's done. And they tend to really underestimate the transformation part. So everybody focuses on the digital rather than on the transformation and, and for anybody who was done, or looked at business transformation in an organization, it's always the people in the organizational side that's the most difficult to crack.

What does digital transformation look like in modern times:

I mean, today, pretty much every executive I meet, you know, within five seconds, you're talking about digital transformation.

And I think as you mentioned earlier, it's got to the point where, you know, is it actually meaningful? Because you have people who provide cloud software services claiming to be doing digital transformation, you have automation companies claiming to do digital transformation. So everyone is doing digital transformation to the point where I think it's lost a little bit of it's meaning to some extent. So I think I'm always arguing for going back to first principles to say, okay what, what do you actually do on Monday morning?

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