The Technology Fallacy: How People Are the Real Key to Digital Transformation by Gerald C. Kane, Anh Nguyen Phillips, Jonathan Copulsky and Garth R. Andrus.
Gerald holds a PhD in Information Systems from Emory University. He is a Professor at the University of Georgia. Anh holds a BA in Humanities from the University of Central Florida. She is a Global CEO Program Research Director at Deloitte. Jonathan holds an MBA from Stanford University. He is Senior Lecturer at Northwestern University. Garth holds a PhD in HR from Vanderbilt University and today is a principal with Deloitte. He a professor of organization studies at both Vanderbilt University and George Washington University.
The Technology Fallacy provides deep insights of more than 16,000 individuals surveyed by MIT Sloan and Deloitte measuring the challenges of digital disruption. In addition, interviews with managers at Walmart, Google, and Salesforce reveal digital disruption will be ongoing and the average worker will experience numerous waves of disruption.
Gerald, Anh, Jonathan and Garth provide organizational leaders a guide to survive the oncoming waves. However to their benefit, leaders need not concern themselves of a technology deep dive. The focus of this book is how organizations must adapt to not only embrace the power of technology, but also stay competitive. For leaders digital disruption is focused upon their employees and the impact digital transformation will make upon their organization’s workflows. Perhaps best stated, only implementing the correct digital technologies for your organization will certainly not be enough to find success.
People are key
The key is moving the organizations culture to become more agile, risk tolerant, and experimental. For some leaders this will be challenging. As you know Drucker’s quote “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” In fact, Drucker was addressing the key element of human factors. So, the first task is measuring your organization’s workforce digital maturity. Furthermore, the failure of Digital Transformation is traced to leaders who place a primary focus upon the technology and not their people and processes. This implies a cultural shift is required for many organizations who are ready.
In fact, these ideas are addressed within HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Leading Digital Transformation by Harvard Business Review.
Again Gerald, Anh, Jonathan and Garth identify three categories of digital maturity; Early, Developing, and Maturing. Early adopters are missing key elements to begin adoption new digital technologies. Developing adopters can recognize their fragmented transformation but have not scaled up yet. Maturing adopters have up-skilled their workforce and can more easily embrace new technologies and business models. The benefit for any organizational leaders is finding real world examples of how companies in their category evolved their culture allowing their workforce to recognize current digital disruptions.
How can leaders take advantage of new technology opportunities and address specifics linking to an overall digital transformation? This book is addressing a need for organizations to fully understand their cultural “digital DNA” and then plan an engaging transformation from “doing digital” to deploying “being digital” workflows.
So, is your organization ready ?
In conclusion, The Technology Fallacy is certainly mandatory reading for organizational leaders. Perhaps one of the most important books for organization to fully digest on their digital transformation journey.