To be sufficiently quick, you need a team that functions like a start-up. That means team members have to be empowered and mistakes must be tolerated in order to achieve fast learning.
Get consultants involved
An article by the McKinsey consultancy company claims things often work well when people from McKinsey, all of whom have a start-up background, form a team with people from the client. By collaborating in this way, the client’s employees are ready to continue working on their own within a couple of months. Staying close to the parent company is a necessity. You don’t want to end up creating a digital silo: the primary task is reinventing the core of the company.
In practice, the approach to be adopted depends on the level of commitment. If senior executives are not fully on board, it is better to build a completely new digital unit slightly to one side of the current business. On the other hand, if support from top management is strong, a digital centre of excellence can be created directly within the existing organisation.
Company culture: the new unit as a role model for others
Experimenting with company culture is not easy: you must not compromise business as usual in the process. In the case of one insurance company from Latin America, a new platform for doing business was created and 60 new digitally savvy employees were hired to foster the new culture of continuous innovation. The McKinsey team spent the last few weeks instructing the new employees and going through various scenarios with them, just to make sure that the change would continue even after the consultants had left the house.
The second part of the article will describe the process of digital transformation itself.
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