A friend's blog post complained that to terminate his account  of a national service provider, he had to physically go to the main state branch. The cumbersome process he experienced was  a waste of time. 

What was surprising is that, this organisation had invested hundreds of millions in their ERP system and yet they can't get  this correct. Obviously there wasn't any anything transformational about this company. 

How come? 

The sad truth is that many organisations think that putting up a new e-commerce site or new accounting system is going to make wonders and transform their organisation - the money will roll in, cost will go down and  and world peace will eventually be realised . 

The brutal truth

The failure of IT  projects is that it is treated as merely an  IT project. This thinking has failed to meet it's core promise to transform and better our lives . 

In our Digital Transformation assessment the parameters are customer experience, leadership, ops/ processes, data, training and technology.  It is worth noting that 70% of the assessment centres around human behaviour rather than technology.

Implementing a Digital Transformation project, as if it's an IT project, is like placing a square peg  into a round hole.  IT project implementation has nothing to do with organisational transformation. Here are some of the gaps:- 

• It uses too much technical jargons which no one really understands except for the geeks (no offence to the nerds);

• Training the users is done at the end, when everyone has forgotten what the project is about, and to be honest no one really pays attention to the training or read the manuals; 

• Does not consider end user analytics or links it to customer experience, so most IT projects are "Syok sendiri" projects and have no relevancy to the customer that keeps the organisation afloat. 

So how? 

The industry has evolved but surprisingly it is not the norm here . We are  still implementing projects like it is the beginning of the MSC.  

The new method is people-centric. 

Read our next blog on one of the Top 100 cooperatives in Malaysia that has successfully utilised this method to transform and adapt during the pandemic. Read here