Dive Brief:
- A new kind of leadership will be necessary to address the changes digital transformation will make to organizational structures and operations, according to 95% of the 3,000 companies surveyed in a Randstad US study in partnership with XBInsight.
- The Workplace 2025: The Post-Digital Frontier study identified five leadership abilities and many personal traits executives will need in the post-digital era. According to respondents in the study, leaders of the future must inspire others, leverage technology, encourage collaboration, drive innovation and manage risk.
- While respondents said an organization's success depends on leaders' strong digital skills, only a quarter of organizations still developing digitally have a strong digital leader in place. This lapse will create a greater possibility that digital initiatives won't be fully realized.
Dive Insight:
An approach to digital transformation that's mostly tactical and not cohesive, companywide or focused will prove ineffective, according to the report. Renovating business technology is also crucial for attracting and retaining talent and will prove challenging if new tools aren't implemented.
Digital transformation goes hand in hand with IT modernization, which is difficult to implement at scale. Instead, many technology business decision makers focus on siloed implementations rather than deploying changes across the technology stack all at once. Progress inspires change, and laggards eyeing other teams' success can become motivated to change their development or deployment process.
But what emerges is the haves and the have nots across an IT department. The same attitude scales to other enterprise technology stakeholders, sowing discord. Even the best digital transformation technology faces resistance, with many unwilling to change.
One of the greatest challenges organizations face is transforming technology tools and culture in tandem. One without the other creates failure. And without a more innovative and fluid culture, organizations will fail to implement emerging technologies, like robotic process automation, which help make work easier.
