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Factors to Digital Project Failure...
- By Ashok Jade
Jun 20, 2019
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Few visionaries in the company suddenly realized that technology to play big role when competitors have
copied every aspect of their business and nothing unique is left with them. They start their Journey of Digitalization with lack of understanding and maturity at top level about strength and limitation of Technology..
Factors for failure - Technology Project fail one after another!
The company was one of the earliest in their industry having a legacy of 5+ decades. The company refers this as Rich Legacy. Till the last decades they were earning profits taking benefits of patents and sanctions which were only with them and there was no-one else in market. Obviously, this brought some degree of arrogance with management and they did not realize the changed market and competition which made them irrelevant slowly and balance-sheet became red.
Few visionaries in the company suddenly realized this fact. These gentlemen believed that technology had to play big role when competitors have copied every aspect of their business and nothing unique is left with them. The fact is that - no one recognised that they are already late.
Newly appointed CIO was being pushed in to invest in technology. The CEO sanctioned all the funds as if company was sitting on heap of cash.
The CIO pulled the socks and charged the IT team. He well collaborated with all the CXO’s as he knows any technology can succeed only through collaboration. Couple of Projects were started. The company was already behind the competition so the solutions were not the first in industry but were essential for business.
All key projects required cross-functional collaboration knowing this fact the CIO approached to the stakeholders to align, but everyone nominated their second level reasoning stretched timelines and busy schedule… Second level was replaced by very junior members in due course… Every HOD escaped from active participation in Projects giving reason of peak biz period, festive season, summer season so on…
CEO restricted his role writing few comments on every project status report… Few Project implemented, few got dropped out and few lingering…
Years passed and balance sheets continued to negative every year… One of the tense meeting concluded stating we need better technology, better system and processes to compete in market…
Not Learning from the past about unpremeditated approach and unaligned team, CEO unwilling to acknowledge the failure of business team found gaps with solution and partner… Biz Leaders also found light of the day and it was decided to evaluate new better system with budget constraints…
What should be concluded -? Will new system be successful -?
Cautious with past experience, they may select global solution, they may on-board global implementation partner and will allocate bigger budget this time... Implementation can go for another year and half... But high probability of situation remains same… CEO may again find technology is not working... He may take extreme step of firing few people…
Since root cause of the problem neither fully understood nor acknowledge, situation remained the same… Most importantly, years has passed and market and competition has made further remarkable progress pushing this organisation much behind and making them more irrelevant in market!