Your organization lacks strategic direction for digitization initiatives. Decisions for e.g. new sales channels, technologies or digital business models, have been postponed for months or years, causing urgently needed digital impulses to be delayed or failed. Expected value and digital benefits often fail to be achieved. As a consequence on-going digitization projects are challended and entire teams get demotivated.

Without a shared vision of the future and a lack of coordinated and clearly communicated goals, island projects are created. If, for example, technologies are only introduced in isolated individual departments without taking into account the overall IT strategy or data governance, the hoped-for added value of the new technology often falls short and expensive investment decisions fail. Because at the end, digitization is not a function, not a department, not a position – it is a cross-enterprise discipline.

Without enterprise-wide program management and project management, digitization initiatives are oftentimes isolated initiatives. Budgets and projects are approved by different sponsors in the organization which leads to a lack of end-to-end value streams. These organizational setups prevent real, digital benefits. For companies, it is usually already a major challenge to make all on-going digitization projects transparent and to determine their goals and allocated budgets.

Companies often find that new products and services attract more attention internally than they do externally with customers. In particular, companies with complex products tend to better listen to their own engineers than to their customers. As a result, the external perspective gradually fades into the background causing developments and trends in the company’s own industry, as well as macro environment, to be missed.