Like any change, Digital Transformation can be visualized as a temple, similar to the temples of excellence or quality. This temple is supported by three pillars:
People: This first and most critical pillar includes all the individuals involved in the change.
Processes: Digital Transformation aims to achieve lasting competitive advantage through more efficient, higher-quality, and more economical processes.
Technology: The technology pillar serves to support, standardize, and help sustain the change.
When implementing Digital Transformation, each pillar is essential. What happens if one is missing?
People + Processes: When our temple misses the technology pillar, a technological debt emerges. The transformation works at the first stage, but in the long-term, the debt grows and sooner or later the technology must be upgraded. As a result, the transformation needs to be repeated, causing additional costs.
This issue is common in companies that create Roadmaps, but whose core expertise lies elsewhere, such as Lean practices. These specialists are skilled in change management, have excellent people skills, and deep process knowledge, but they are often unable to provide technological support.
Processes + Technology: As previously mentioned, the pillar of people is fundamental. Without it, organizational resistance emerges, and the transformation is doomed to fail, rejected from the inside.
This problem often occurs among technology suppliers or systems integrators who excel in understanding both processes and technology but can’t engage people and establish permanent organizational change.
People + Technology: When processes are neglected, the errors that were initially related to processes are rebuilt and solidified as systemic. These errors are very difficult to uproot, as in addition to changing people, technological changes also need to be made.
The problem often arises with large consulting firms who perfectly communicate with people, especially the management, and know the technology well but don’t conduct Gemba or delve into the process layer. As a result, their work looks great from the strategic point of view but is not reflected in practical implementation. Similarly, when the Roadmap is designed by an ERP system supplier, they are rarely capable of diagnosing processes in production.