CHAPTER 12

SUSTAINING THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Large transformation programs often fail to reach their goals because they lose their momentum. Digital transformation is no different. It’s easy to stay motivated in the early days—T-shirts, baseball caps, regular video communications, visible engagement programs, quick wins, best practices sharing, and new leadership roles. But as time goes by, change fatigue sets in and new ways of working begin to give in to the old way of doing things.

This is the time where skills gaps become obvious; where unaligned metrics and incentives get in the way of doing the right thing; and where leadership teams, busy planning the next strategic move, too often assume that the digital transition is flying on autopilot on its way to completion.

These can be dangerous times. Until new digital practices are rooted into your customer experience, your operations, and your ways of working, there is a real danger that the momentum of your digital transformation will start faltering. Without a concerted effort to sustain the transformation program, your vision and your business objectives may be at risk. Joe Gross of insurer Allianz Group explained: “I think the top challenge for Allianz will be to maintain and accelerate the momentum that we have already generated. It’s still an evolving process—we cannot hope to see immediate results. It’s also easy for organizations to slip back into old, familiar patterns. The challenge for us is not to go back to our comfort zones and instead always keep looking for new digital opportunities.”¹

What can we learn from Digital Masters about making digital transformations sustainable? Ensuring that you are managing three aspects of your digital transition will help sustain the momentum of your transformation. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Building foundation capabilities: Do you have a plan for a ramp-up of digital competence within your organization? Do you have a well-structured digital platform? Do you have strong IT–business relationships?
• Aligning reward structures: Are your incentives, rewards, and recognitions aligned to your transformation objectives?
• Measuring, monitoring, and iterating: Do you have a management process that allows you to measure and monitor the progress of your digital transformation? Do you have enough visibility to adapt your course as needed?

FIGURE 12.1

The digital transformation compass: sustaining the digital transformation

ARE YOU BUILDING FOUNDATIONAL CAPABILITIES?

Technology innovation is outpacing many firms’ ability to build organizational capabilities fast enough. In chapter 8 we showed that Digital Masters build three solid foundations to sustain their digital transformation. They build digital skills—the experience and knowledge of people. They build a well-structured digital platform—the assembly of technology to power their business processes. And they develop strong IT–business relationships—trusted, shared, and integrated interactions between technology and businesspeople.

Orchestrate Your Skills Build-Up

Building digital skills is a gradual process. There’s no silver bullet, so getting it right won’t happen overnight. You need to craft a capability building and organization development plan meshing several complementary approaches—hiring, training, partnering, acquiring, or incubating.

But first, you need to understand what your skills gap is. At operational levels, you need to first conduct a proper skill inventory assessment to understand the retooling required in your key functions: what you have today, what your digital transformation requires, and the skill gap that needs to be filled. Ask your HR organization to take a lead on this. And consider all tactics at your disposal.

Hiring

The ability to make good hires is the most obvious tool. External hiring is effective in bringing both digital leadership skills to the senior levels and specific capabilities in the more operational roles.

Start at the top. When you are trying to build up digital skills in your company, bringing in digital awareness and experience at the board level is useful. For example, in 2012, Coca-Cola added Robert Kotick, CEO of game company Activision Blizzard, to its board. Muhtar Kent, chairman and CEO, explained: “Bobby brings an entrepreneurial mindset and a high level of financial literacy and digital knowledge to our company. His global brand expertise and insight will be invaluable as we continue to grow our business and invest in enhancing our digital engagement with consumers and customers around the world.”² Many organizations also bring in experienced executives to inject digital leadership in their senior executive team. Nestlé, the food giant, brought in Pete Blackshaw as global head of digital and social media in 2011 to harmonize and accelerate the company’s digital marketing strategy.³

Innovate in your recruitment strategy. Use all of the recruitment channels that digital technologies bring today—social media, online recruitment agencies, and other online communities—as well as more traditional routes. L’Oréal, for instance, developed “Reveal,” a recruitment website that takes the form of a business game.⁴ Not surprisingly, digital-savvy Generation Y candidates preferred to be engaged through digital means—49 percent of candidates are more likely to consider a job advertised in an innovative way.⁵

Cast your net wide for rare skills. Go and get talents where they are. Look outside your own industry to acquire valuable skills, or partner with academic institutions to get early exposure. This is what Caesars did when it needed to beef up its quantitative skills. The company identified the companies that were, at the time, the most advanced in terms of analytics skills—many were in the financial services sector. Caesars proceeded to attract candidates from these companies to build a solid set of core analytical skills.

Training

Training is essential to grow your capabilities from within. Many of your existing employees will be eager to embark on their personal digital journeys to grow their skills. Training comes in several flavors: digital awareness programs, specific digital skills training and certification, employee exchange programs, reverse mentoring, and even your own internal digital university.

Increase your digital awareness. L’Oréal, for example, wanted to increase digital awareness in several functions, including marketing, research, manufacturing, communication, and sales. The company launched a specific program to train fifteen thousand individuals, including managers, in digital fluency in two years.⁶

Bring employees up to speed in specific digital technologies. Intel started a Digital IQ training program comprising sixty online courses spanning diverse areas, from social media measurement to brand identity. Its success led the company to launch an internal certification called the Digital IQ 500, which licenses employees to practice social media on behalf of the company.⁷

Organize employee exchange programs. Such programs can also be a good way for your company to leverage key partners to improve digital skills. P&G, for example, started an employee exchange program with Google. Employees from both companies participate in each other’s training programs and business meetings.⁸ This program enabled select P&G employees to gain expertise on digital and search marketing. On the other hand, for Google, which controls about 74 percent of search-term advertising spending, the exchange enables Google employees to gain insight into the working practices and culture of the world’s biggest advertiser.⁹

Introduce reverse-mentoring programs. Originally pioneered by GE, reverse mentoring is also a great way to pair your digital-savvy employees with executives in a nonhierarchical way. Krish Shankar, head of HR at Indian telecommunications group Bharti Airtel, explained: “The future of technology will be defined by the youth, and unless we talk to the younger generation and observe them closely, we will not know their demands. A [reverse-mentoring] program like this sends a message that no matter how high up you are, you are never too old to learn.”¹⁰

Consider building your own digital university. Kering, the luxury-brands holding company, set up its own in-house digital academy to increase digital skills globally. The focus is threefold: to develop brand innovation, to build digital awareness among managers, and to create an international community around digital transformation across the group.¹¹

Partnering

Partnerships can be very effective when you’re lacking critical skills that your ecosystem partners already possess. Angela Ahrendts, Burberry’s CEO, explained: “We began sharing our vision of our ecosystem with our technology partners. We told them: Burberry is global, dynamic, and has a clear vision. We have an amazing CTO and an IT team that’s nimble and fast. So our proposal was: let us be your R&D. Let’s experiment together.”¹²

Partnerships can also be effective for accessing specific skills critical to your product or service innovation. GE, for instance, partnered with Quirky, a social product-development company. The partnership enables the Quirky product-development community to access GE’s patents and accelerate advanced innovations in manufacturing. In return, GE encourages product innovation that builds on GE technology without fear of potential infringement.¹³ With proper skill-transfer mechanisms, partnering can be very effective.

Acquiring (or “Acqui-Hires”)

You can acquire generally small companies purely for their talent. When Walmart Labs wanted to strengthen its offerings across mobile and social media channels, it acquired a range of mobile-related agencies that were focused on product development.¹⁴ When other methods are too slow or when skills are rare, acquisitions can be the answer. But, as with any people-based acquisition, they can be risky to implement.

Incubating

Through incubation, you invest in agile start-ups while providing them access to your company’s technical and executive support. By opening up your resources to such start-ups, you can access specialized talent that would otherwise be tough to source. Mondelez, the global snack company, launched its Mobile Futures incubator in 2011 to harness mobile marketing start-up capabilities. The company hopes to launch mobile-focused tech companies out of the process. But more importantly, it wants to garner new capabilities—such as in-store marketing, location-based advertising, and social-TV applications—to drive innovation.¹⁵ If you want to infuse entrepreneurial spirit and access state-of-the-art digital skills, an incubator model can be very helpful, but it requires strong program management to succeed.

Building strong digital skills is essential to secure the sustainability of your digital transformation program. In some areas, you will need to build capabilities at scale, while in other areas, you may need to target very narrow skills. There is no shortage of methods of how you can get there. What matters is the impact on execution. You need a clear plan, investment, and a concerted implementation with your functions and business units. And don’t do it alone. You need your HR and organizational development teams by your side and mandated to implement this complex capability shift.

Build Your Digital Platform

Earlier in the book we described how important it is to have a strong digital platform. Why? Because a well-defined and well-managed platform provides you with the information you need to make decisions and the coordination you need to power your processes as effectively as possible. Great digital platforms are at the same time a bridge to your customers and a gateway to your internal and third-party processes. When it’s good, your platform enables you to personalize your customer interactions, perform analytics, optimize your internal processes, manage seamlessly across channels, and have a single view of your customers.

A digital platform is a coherent set of business processes, along with supporting infrastructure, applications, and data, intended to ensure the quality and predictability of core transactions.¹⁶ It should be well defined, well managed, and only as complex as necessary. Great digital platforms make your company’s business processes more efficient, less risky, and more agile.¹⁷ Unfortunately, in many large companies, the platform is a mess of spaghetti—overly complex, expensive to run, tough to change, and prone to failure.

If you hope to transform your customer engagements or operations, you’ll need to start by transforming your platform. It’s what Angela Ahrendts of Burberry did when launching her digital transformation program. It’s what Lloyds Banking Group did in setting the stage for new digital banking capabilities. And it’s what, in all likelihood, you’ll have to do as you get started.

What does it take to build the right digital platform? A useful approach is to think in terms of an enterprise architecture—a roadmap explaining the desired organizing logic of your business processes and underlying technology.¹⁸ Many people find it helpful to think of their enterprise architecture in three different, but coordinated, layers. First, you need a technical architecture comprising existing applications and new ones, as well as the underlying infrastructure for processing, storage, and communication. Some technologies will be managed by you, some by your partners, and some by third-party suppliers—often cloud-based. You also need a business process architecture to understand your desired level of integration and standardization across different parts of the company, and how your business processes make your company work. You should be able to map your current state to your future state with the technical and organizational changes that will be required to get there. Increasingly, companies are building a data architecture. This is an understanding of your content—how information is produced and how it is distributed. Is it structured or unstructured? How will it be used for transactions and for analytics? How will you manage requirements for security, privacy, and data retention? How can you get to a unified view of your customers, processes, and performance?

To move your platform in the right direction, you will need strong digital governance. An effective governance model both rejects requests that will add unnecessary complexity and facilitates initiatives that will improve the platform’s capabilities. Governance is essential to build a platform that is standardized enough to provide efficiency and enable changes that affect the whole company, like the platform at pharmacy retailer CVS that we discussed in chapter 8. It should also provide ways that different units can customize parts of the platform or innovate on top of it, as local hotels can do with Caesars Entertainment’s corporate web platform.

Building world-class digital platforms is not a job just for your CIO and his or her technical team. They can’t do it on their own. It’s a job for you and other business executives, working in tandem with your IT leaders. You need the discipline to follow standards and avoid unnecessary exceptions, and the savvy to envision new ways you can work with a great platform and new technologies. Your IT leaders can be valuable partners in helping you build this platform, if you are willing to engage with them.

Develop a Close IT–Business Relationship

In the long-distant past, we were taught that IT was the keeper of technology and that IT leaders were service providers to the rest of the business. Their job was to stay aligned with business strategy, taking orders from the business and delivering new systems. If they kept the systems running and delivered projects on time, then all was good. That time is over, and it has been for many years.

To be effective, digital transformation demands a fusion between IT and business skills. It requires mutual trust and shared understanding. It also requires new methods of working—agile learning-by-doing approaches for fast-moving, customer-facing innovations; more-systematic methods for more-critical and longer-lasting projects, and the wisdom to mix the methods appropriately.

Years of separation can get in the way of building the strong relationships you need. In many organizations, the interaction will not come naturally. But moving from a poor relationship to a state of true partnership between IT and business leaders is possible. We’ve seen it dozens of times in companies around the world, and there are good guides to help you create that partnership.¹⁹ Unfortunately, achieving the new partnership takes time and effort. Your digital transformation may need to start before you have completely changed the culture of, and the relationship between, IT and business leaders across your organization. We’ve seen some Digital Masters take different approaches to begin improving the IT–business relationship. Some efforts are top-down, some are project-based, some are governance-based, and some are organizational.

Top-Down

Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts mandated that the CIO would be part of the senior management team. But just putting him on the team was not enough. She worked closely with him to help him develop into a new role. And she was very clear that the members of her team needed to work on the relationship from their own business-oriented sides.²⁰ This worked, because the senior-most executive in the company led the IT/business fusion.

Project-Based

Some companies take a Skunk Works approach to digital innovation projects. They extract the resources required from business and IT to deliver a specific initiative for a limited duration. This has the advantage of being easy to set up. But although a project-based approach improves communication, it does not commit the two communities to work together over time.

Governance-Based

Strong governance processes require an integrated IT and business approach to vetting and conducting projects. An integrated approach helps IT and business executives spend time together and to jointly identify how they’ll make their initiatives happen. Making business leaders accountable for the financial results of technology projects is one good way to ensure that IT and business are in sync. In a large apparel company, for example, if a unit needs funding for a digital initiative, the president of the business unit makes the pitch directly to an executive steering committee and is required to give a specific, measurable return target. Then, after implementation, the unit president must go in front of his or her colleagues and show whether the return was achieved, as well as why. This kind of accountability drives stronger links between technology and business executives, since the credibility of the business executive depends on working closely with IT to make results happen.

Organizational

Some organizational changes can start to dissolve the distance between IT and business units. For example, TetraPak aligns its IT and businesspeople around strong business process ownership. The business process owner controls what changes will be made to processes, and coordinates IT and businesspeople to make them happen. Other companies have made technology and operations people report to the same senior executive. Meanwhile, other companies have created specific organizational units to deliver their digital roadmaps. This unit, such as Nike Digital Sport or the one at Lloyds Banking Group, may have its own resources or a combination of owned and shared resources. Or it may be a dual-speed IT arrangement as we discussed in chapter 8.

Whatever the model, getting your IT and business leaders to work more closely together—in an environment of trust, shared understanding, and collaboration—is a prerequisite for sustaining your transformation and gaining the digital advantage of Digital Masters.

ARE YOUR REWARD STRUCTURES ALIGNED TO YOUR TRANSFORMATION GOALS?

Your company’s transformation goals and measures are inextricably linked. Reward structures are the glue that binds them. Many of the challenges labeled as “resistance to change” during a transformation are actually conflicts about measures and rewards. For that reason, two-thirds of Digital Masters in our survey have explicitly tied reward structures to their digital transformation goals.²¹ Digital transformation gives business leaders a good opportunity to reassess the combination of financial and nonfinancial incentives that will best serve the company’s goals. You need to calibrate your reward structures to overcome conflicts and sustain your digital transformation.

Start at the Top

We’ve shown in the framing phase the importance of aligning the top team around a vision. We’ve also discussed the cross-functional nature of digital transformation throughout the book. A collective top team incentive—based on the success or the progress of your digital transformation—is often a good way to facilitate this alignment.

Smooth End-to-End Operations

Operations can constitute a real challenge to aligning digital transformation goals. How can you ensure end-to-end delivery of your core processes or smooth the interface between functions and business units? Some conflicts in your reward structures will be obvious from the early stage, and you will need to fix them. But many won’t. They will occur as you get into the depth of your digital conversion. You need to remain alert, as they will act like bottlenecks or excuses for slowing down your transformation efforts. Employee resistance to change was cited as one of the biggest hurdles to implementing digital transformation in our initial phase of interviews.²²

Consider the retail sector as an illustration. Online channels are fast gaining more traction. One of the biggest challenges facing retailers today is integrating online and offline channels. In 2011, Walmart defined new incentives for its store managers and employees. These people now had to push online sales from their respective territories, just as they did for in-store sales. Following this alignment of rewards, employees started promoting Walmart.com, the new iPad app, and the My Local Walmart Facebook app to the 140 million weekly in-store shoppers.²³

Similarly, John Lewis, the chain of department stores in the United Kingdom, rolled out a Click and Collect strategy whereby shoppers can collect their online purchases from a brick-and-mortar store. In order to effectively drive offline-online store coordination, the company attributes online sales to the relevant customer’s local store. Store managers became accountable not just for in-store sales, but also for overall internet sales in their catchment area. This change motivated managers to influence customers to purchase products from the website. After rolling out its Click and Collect strategy, John Lewis witnessed a significant increase in sales across its online channels. A third of all online orders are now collected in John Lewis or Waitrose (food retail division of John Lewis) stores.²⁴

Make Sure the Rewards Are More Than Financial

The reward structures for sustaining digital transformation should not be just financial. Intangible incentives such as status, reputation, recognition, expertise, and privileges are great managerial levers to drive employee motivation, productivity, and ultimately reach your transformation goals.²⁵ Indeed, research suggests that nonfinancial motivators are sometimes more effective than financial rewards in fostering employee engagement.²⁶ For example, as we discussed earlier, Chilean mining company Codelco and technology company EMC created internal innovation awards to promote new ideas, encourage workers to innovate, and consequently effect a culture change.

Digital technologies are also enabling new forms of incentives, such as gamification.²⁷ Intangible rewards, such as recognition and real-time feedback, provided through gamification initiatives, can yield positive results. When a midsized firm installed a new event-logging system for its sales force, the firm found very poor adoption rates from its employees. To rectify this, the company ran a weeklong sales competition where every event logged would receive a point and the employee accruing the highest number of points would receive a $100 gift certificate at a local restaurant. The number of events shot up by 750 percent. Even four weeks into the contest, events logged were six times higher than previous levels.²⁸

Extend Reward Structures Beyond Your Corporate Boundary

Part of your digital transformation may require that you extend reward structures beyond your own corporate boundary to suppliers, partners, or even customers. Samsung, the Korean electronics giant, wanted to increase customer advocacy on its Samsung.com portal. The company rolled out a social incentive program, using gamification techniques, to measure, recognize, and reward key customer advocates who could promote Samsung products to their networks. By looking beyond the corporation, Samsung turned passive web visitors into active brand advocates. The site recorded a 500 percent increase in reviews and 200 percent more comments.²⁹

Sustaining your digital transformation program will be highly influenced by your ability to align your reward and recognition structures to your goals. It is a complex, multidimensional challenge. Not all the misalignments will be obvious from the start, so you will have to tackle them in stages. But the benefits will outweigh the difficulties. Rewards drive behavior, for better or for worse. And changing people’s behavior is what, ultimately, will drive culture change in your organization.

ARE YOU MEASURING AND MONITORING YOUR DIGITAL PROGRESS?

The old management adage “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is as true for digital transformation as it is for any other business activity. Digital transformation can’t be sustained through just an act of faith from your senior team. Having a proper measurement and monitoring system in place will provide you with confidence that the investments and the business change are bringing real benefits to your organization. In addition, over two-thirds of executives we surveyed think that measurements have a critical effect on changing the culture of an organization.³⁰ Therefore, metrics should constitute the backbone of your transformation program and the instrument panel with which to guide it.

How does measurement work? There are four basic steps to properly measuring and monitoring progress: managing your strategic scorecard, driving an initiative-level business case and KPIs to measure the progress of your digital initiatives, connecting top-down and initiative-level measures, and developing an iterative review process.

Managing Your Strategic Scorecard

Keeping track of your strategic scorecard is the task of senior management. Earlier in the investment-focusing phase, we saw the importance of translating your vision into strategic goals that reflect the final state of what you are trying to achieve. Financial measures will play a big part. But your strategic scorecard should also contain digital goals for customer experience, for operational processes, and for the organizational capabilities that you need to build. The scorecard should provide a basic template for your entire digital transformation effort. You need to manage individual components of your scorecard actively to ensure the balanced progress of your transformation.

A multibrand global company wanted to review the progress of its digital transformation program, so the executive team implemented an executive digital dashboard to ensure proper focus on the right objectives and oversight on the companywide transformation. The company went further by building a virtual digital P&L that included all online activities across the group, independently of the entity that actually generates the revenue or incurs the cost. The executive team also set up a Digital Transformation Index as a compound measure to monitor progress of each business unit. But not everything is top-down.

Drive the Initiative-Level Business Case and Related KPIs

In chapter 10, we also highlighted the need to quantify and monitor the benefits of your digital roadmap—by engaging employees with the right expertise to provide rigor and commitment to the exercise. Clear business cases also act as great motivators for people to transform the business.

Your KPIs will come in different flavors. Some will be high level, and some, very granular. Typically, your process-driven performance measures will be captured by a few key metrics, such as online credit-card application-to-issue time. Others will be more related to experiments and proofs of concept, such as measuring the impact of an online ad campaign on Facebook. The key is to choose the metrics that are critical to attain your long-term transformation objectives.

Connect Top-Down and Initiative-Level Measures

By connecting your top-down and initiative-level measures, you build a coherent business management process. You need to make clear how each of your digital initiatives contributes to your transformation goals and strategic scorecard. You must also understand the cause and effect of each initiative. Establishing such a measurement cascade will ensure that the teams remain focused on delivering the vision and that business leaders have visibility of the business impact.

Develop an Iterative Review Process

An iterative review will allow you to monitor progress and correct your course when necessary. The review needs to be conducted rigorously and frequently, and with the flexibility that digital programs demand. Digital transformation requires constant adaptation as new technology appears and as your teams discover and test new opportunities for improvement. Traditional sectors are learning quickly from born-digital companies. For example, the UK government recently embarked on a Digital by Default program. Mike Bracken, head of the Government Digital Services, explained the government’s new iterative approach in the digital space: “Do it quick, fail fast, learn your lessons and continue to change—that’s why you need the skills inside the organization.”³¹

At the executive level, the iterative review process will help you to choose and prioritize new initiatives—which ones advance your transformation goals, and which are peripheral. It will also help you kill those that do not lead to real benefits. At the operational level, it will ensure that critical digital initiatives are progressing to plan, and raise early warnings when organizational bottlenecks get in the way.

Sustaining the momentum of your digital transformation is critical to long-term success. It requires building new foundation skills that will make the change possible, aligning reward structures to ensure that employees are motivated and organizational bottlenecks are removed, and putting in place an iterative review process to measure progress frequently. When enthusiasm tapers off and you start to encounter more resistance from within your organization, these sustaining interventions will become essential to help you stay the course.

So what’s new with sustaining your transformation in a digital world? Even more than in the past, it is essential to truly integrate your technology and business capabilities. Ramping up digital capabilities faster than your competitors is a source of advantage. Building a coherent digital platform will speed up transformation. Digital transformation demands a new fusion of IT and business skills. Aligning online and offline incentives and rewards is more important than ever, and will remove bottlenecks. Digital technology has enabled new forms of incentives, such as gamification. Connecting your top-down and initiative-level digital metrics will make clear how your digital initiatives contribute to your transformation goals.

So, is this end of the journey? Absolutely not. Although you, and your organization, will have applied the approaches that have given Digital Masters the digital advantage, the transformation is never finished. Even if you become a Digital Master, you will need to work to remain one. In the epilogue, we will explain why.

HOW WELL IS YOUR ORGANIZATION SUSTAINING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION?

Table 12.1 summarizes how you can sustain the digital challenge in three key steps. Look at the central questions at each step, and give an honest assessment of your company’s progress on a scale from 1 to 7 (1 = strongly disagree; 4 = neutral; 7 = strongly agree). For each of the three steps, total your scores across the individual questions.

Table 12.1

How well is your organization sustaining digital transformation?

For each of the three questions, rate your company, using a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 = strongly disagree; 4 = neutral; and 7 = strongly agree, and find the recommended action for your score.

Do you have the technology leadership capabilities you need?	Score
The organization is investing in the necessary skills.
Where appropriate, we use common digital platforms.
We have strong IT-business relationships.
Total score

Scoring: Over 16: you have the technology leadership capabilities you need for digital transformation; 8–16: you have started implementing projects aimed at developing capabilities, but more is needed; less than 8: you need to consider specific programs for improving technology leadership capabilities.

Are your reward structures aligned with your transformation goals?	Score
Financial incentives (bonuses, etc.) are aligned with the goals of digital transformation.
Awards and recognition mechanisms are aligned with the goals of digital transformation.
Personal rewards (performance reviews, promotions, etc.) are aligned with the goals of digital transformation.
Total score

Scoring: Over 14: your current reward structures are aligned with your digital objectives; 6–14: build consensus around a viable reward strategy aligned to digital transformation; less than 6: implement specific reward structures that accomplish digital goals.

Are you measuring and monitoring your digital progress?	Score
Digital initiatives are assessed through a common set of key performance indicators (KPIs).
We have a clear line of sight from project-level KPIs to goals on our strategic scorecard.
We regularly review with the top team our progress on digital transformation.
Total score

Scoring: Over 15: you believe you have the necessary KPIs in place; 7–15: isolate specific measurement parameters, and use them to measure progress; less than 7: establish a process to develop KPIs, identify the correct level of measurement, and iteratively track progress.

For each step, we have provided you with a target that places you among the Digital Masters. We’ve also provided a threshold below which you should start taking action now to improve your situation. If your score is in the Digital Master range, you are ready to move on. If your score is in the middle range, reflect on why. Your team still needs to work out a few things in the sustaining phase. If your score is in the lower range, it is time for remedial actions. If it is well below, you run the risk of early burnout. We recommend that you take action on capabilities, rewards, and measurements to make sure your program becomes sustainable.