Adopting digital technology, carrying out a digital transformation. Doing these things successfully requires careful planning and an awareness of some of the most common pitfalls.

Let’s take a look at five of the top risks and challenges that can sidetrack a digital transformation.

Bad Data
Digital transformation solutions are data-driven and we use the data intelligence they produce to carry out human and automated decision-making. Our data science systems rely on lots of input data in order to produce this data intelligence for us. But, what if the input data is flawed? It could be incomplete, inaccurate, biased or even altogether fake.

The quality and success of our decision-making will be directly proportional to the quality of the data intelligence upon which our decisions are based. In other words, bad data can lead to bad decisions. And, an added danger here is that it can sometimes take a long time before we even realize that we’re using bad data to make our decisions. It is therefore critical that our team has the right skills and tools to identify and filter out bad input data before we even consider using it.

Over-Automation
There are many opportunities to adopt new digital technology to improve or increase how we can automate our business operations. But automating too much too soon can lead to serious problems.

For example, we might introduce optimizations that overly complicate business processes or inadvertently impact customer experiences in a negative way. Either way, automation enhancements need to be phased in and individually assessed. Because undoing premature automations is painful and expensive and can distress our customers. In other words, over-automation can end up taking us backwards instead of forwards.

Digital Culture Anxiety
The introduction of technologies like AI and RPA, as well as a shift toward a more customer-centric approach can change how an organization is internally structured and can impact how employees have traditionally performed certain tasks.

These types of changes can lead to confusion and resistance to adopting a new digital culture. This can then significantly undermine a digital transformation effort. A business needs strong leadership, advance planning and two-way communication to establish understanding and support for how and why organizational changes need to be made.

More Vulnerable Digital Data
A digital transformation will almost always result in an organization generating and accumulating more business data and having to make more of that data available online. This then naturally increases the risk of more business data being exposed to cyberthreats. Businesses need to invest more in cybersecurity technologies and practices to provide increased protection and this is something that needs to be put in place in advance of growing our online presence.

We want the cybersecurity architecture of our digital business solutions to be as proactively preventative as possible so that we minimize the chances of having to experience successful cyber-attacks.

Daunting Governance
An IT governance framework provides policies and rules for us to regulate and evolve parts of our IT enterprise. But the potential scope of a digital transformation is not limited to a part of our IT enterprise. Its scope goes beyond IT and is usually much greater than what we are used to. If a business is not prepared for this, it could lose control of the direction in which it is transforming, and that could steer the whole initiative off-course.

These are some of the more common risks and challenges. For any organization, there will be, of course, other pitfalls and obstacles that need to be planned for and overcome to ensure that digital technology adoption and digital transformation are accomplished successfully.

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