Here is a brief excerpt from the results of a survey conducted by McKinsey & Company, featured in the McKinsey Quarterly. To read the complete article, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, obtain subscription information, and register to receive email alerts, please click here.
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Digital transformations are even more difficult than traditional change efforts to pull off. But the results from the most effective transformations point to five factors for success.
As digital technologies dramatically reshape industry after industry, many companies are pursuing large-scale change efforts to capture the benefits of these trends or simply to keep up with competitors. In a new McKinsey Global Survey on digital transformations, more than eight in ten respondents say their organizations have undertaken such efforts in the past five years.1 Yet success in these transformations is proving to be elusive. While our earlier research has found that fewer than one-third of organizational transformations succeed at improving a company’s performance and sustaining those gains, the latest results find that the success rate of digital transformations is even lower.
The results from respondents who do report success point to 21 best practices, all of which make a digital transformation more likely to succeed. These characteristics fall into five categories: leadership, capability building, empowering workers, upgrading tools, and communication. These categories suggest where and how companies can start to improve their chances of successfully making digital changes to their business.
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- having the right, digital-savvy leaders in place
- building capabilities for the workforce of the future
- empowering people to work in new ways
- giving day-to-day tools a digital upgrade
- communicating frequently via traditional and digital methods
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
The contributors to the development and analysis of this survey include Hortense de la Boutetière, a partner in McKinsey’s Paris office, and Alberto Montagner and Angelika Reich, an associate partner and partner, respectively, in the Zurich office.
They wish to thank Cristy Chopra, Carolyn Dewar, Julie Goran, and Michael Krüsi for their contributions to this work.