According to a study by McKinsey, seventy percent of transformations fail. Contributing factors include “insufficiently high aspirations, a lack of engagement within the organization, and limited investment in resources and skills across the organization to sustain the change, among others.”
Our experience here at ConnX is a match to McKinsey’s observations. In summary, it becomes increasingly difficult to move DX projects over the goal line when:
- There is a lack of conviction from CEO or Senior Leaders
- There is a lack of skills needed to drive transformation
- Companies are missing the procedural elements – assessment, implementation plan, project and change management
- There is no regular cadence of leadership oversight meetings to track progress and performance
What we believe leads to successful projects, especially in the areas of real time communications, Planning, Assessment and Project Management combined with the tools and resources needed to achieve a timely and successful outcome.
What we have found after implementing dozens of transformation projects is that when teams can be truly productive – with online, cloud-based productivity applications there is a multiplier effect on other DX projects.
For example, imagine undertaking an initiative to build a “smart” food manufacturing and packaging plant. The benefits are obvious – more automation reduces costs, digital quality control processes including computer vision at the edge ensures consistency, temperature and moisture sensors improve compliance with FDA requirements, robotics increase yield – and more.
When we step back, however, as amazing as this transformational technology for manufacturing and packaging plants may be, ambitious projects like this cannot succeed without people.
Given our experience, every major digital transformation project that succeeds includes this fundamental ability to cooperate toward a common goal and gain stakeholder buy-in,
Our Maestro Platform Brings It All Together
ConnX has been serving large, distributed, often highly regulated and complex organizations since the 1990s. We are extremely proud of our own ability to continually transform and improve as innovations in real time communications surfaced and lead to Internet-based voice, video, messaging over faster and more secure IP networks.
With Cloud Telco, including virtualization and infrastructure as a service combined with more powerful computers and smartphones at reasonable prices, nobody was more excited than we were.
We lived through legacy systems – including phone systems, followed by IP-PBX, SIP trunking, SIP Trunking as a Service (STaaS) Unified Communications (UC), Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) and we worked non-stop to ensure what we were providing to our customers was the best value and scalable in a pure-cloud future.
We witnessed firsthand the dramatic improvement of Microsoft Office and full range of solutions (as well as solutions from Microsoft’s competitors like Slack, Zoom, Go-To-Meeting, Box, Dropbox, and many others), and we did the math.
The Economics of Transformed Digital Networks, Productivity Solutions, Cloud Contact Center and More
Key to success in developing, implementing, monitoring, managing, and scaling new communications architectures are very clear to us, given how many projects we have completed for so many happy customers.
Here’s my top ten list which aligns with the McKinsey playbook, but with a sharp focus on the “Three C’s”:
- Determine the business outcomes you strive for and apply specific metrics to each
- Analyze your IT spend going back several years and determine how much of a mix of on premise and pure cloud IaaS you believe will be best for your business (CapEx/OpEx)
- Inventory all the solutions being used – either officially – or as “shadow IT” – and develop a migration plan that is so smooth, end users who “prefer Slack” will instead prefer the awesome new environment you are building
- Interview every leader across every division in the organization to understand what their needs are now – not a year ago or five years ago – and how they believe they can benefit from more predictable, higher quality, easier to access and secure connectivity, communications, and collaboration applications
- Develop a plan with a timetable and associated budget
- Enlist stakeholders to serve as advisors throughout the project, once the project is approved and in place
- Check in at least once a week even if only for 30 minutes with all stakeholders; doing so will reduce email and confusion dramatically
- Use the best collaboration platform you can find that fits your business and invest in that up front
- Keep the C-Suite informed and engaged – and enthusiastic about the new digital way of working and serving customers
- Find the most experienced, proven, optimistic and realistic Managed Service Provider you can find – we believe that may be ConnX!
We were made for transformation and innovation – from day one. Our talented team spans all disciplines of the new digital stack, and we are ready to roll up our sleeves and connect with all those who have a vision for a more digitally enabled organization.
While we do not transform everything, we transform the foundation with connectivity, communications and collaboration solutions that are orchestrated with Maestro, and truly future proof given our constant desire to bring more value – whether more digital capabilities or less cost – to all our existing and new customers.
Before considering digital transformation, companies must stress the importance of detailed planning, assessment, and project management, all of which are essential to success. In addition, having the right tools to deliver this phase of transformation cannot be overlooked.
ConnX has provided expert consultative results for some of the most technically complex transformations for over 25 years.
I’d love to learn where you are at in your journey, and to put great minds together to position your organization for success.
