“Digital change” is on many decision-makers’ lips, and at the heart of many companies’ concerns (especially large ones). So yes, digital technology is upending our habits, our practices, even our tastes, in our professional and personal lives alike. But beyond the topicality, are the changes announced and experienced really so original?
The excitement generated today by “digital change” – whose effects are so new that researchers have as yet barely analysed them – can be fascinating: first academic conferences, dedicated blogs, the appearance of “Chief Digital Officers” at the highest level of large groups, offers of expertise, roll-outs of new tools… But it also has a taste of “déjà vu”, beyond the intrinsic novelty of the objects on which “digital change” rests, a priori at the cutting edge of technological creativity.
“Déjà vu”? From CSR to ESN…
This feeling first of all recalls the wave of transformations that companies and large organisations went through when the principles of “sustainable development” were translated into the economic world, nearly twenty years ago, with the idea of CSR (corporate social responsibility).
Regulatory action, political declarations, the creation of Sustainable Development Departments, staff training, the development of management tools and annual reports… This theme was then a powerful lever of transformation for companies, and of growth for a market of more or less specialised service providers.
Where is CSR today? Genuine, lasting adoption by becoming part of everyday practice – or trivialisation as fashions changed? In any case, in French one acronym has given way to another that differs only in gender: « la RSE » (responsabilité sociale des entreprises, corporate social responsibility) has given way to « le RSE » (réseau social d’entreprise – a platform offered by some developers to encourage exchanges between employees, a kind of in-house Facebook), which, thanks to “digital change”, many companies must now adopt to demonstrate their modernity.
And behind this term, we find several assertions and expectations often expressed in corporate life in recent years, with the end (still under way) of Taylorist logics and the appearance of “management” (and now leadership): individual recognition (knowing one’s neighbour), group cohesion (the sense of belonging), the sharing of practices (from the document database to a new-look “knowledge management”).
With this affirmation of close attention to “digital change” – and because it is pleasant and useful to project oneself into a modernity that is always technological, since it is more visible than that of behaviours – it cannot be ruled out that we also find here an attempt by companies to compete with individuals’ appetite for new digital practices, in order to “recapture” the working time and creativity that their employees devote to outside networks not directly contributing to the employer’s purpose.
But overall, in this type of project, we find many recurring concerns of corporate life.
Customer orientation and the extended enterprise
One aspect of the “digital transformation” is the reaffirmation of the customer relationship among the company’s priorities. For a very small business or an SME, customer orientation is so natural – it is a matter of survival – that it is rarely stated.
For a large group, the customer is sometimes, for some, more a concept than a daily reality, one that internal issues may have caused to be forgotten. And it is always useful to remember that, even in the functions furthest from the “front office”, it is always the customer who pays the salaries…
With digital, the customer is coming closer to the company again. Directly, because tools and above all daily practices put transparency and responsiveness at the heart of the expectations of consumers/customers, who want a personalised solution, right away, on their doorstep. But also indirectly, because the growth opportunities many companies are looking for, in this period of economic crisis, often lie in areas where new, innovative, agile competitors are emerging. Complete unknowns become leaders within a few years and capture – even more than attention – investments that inspire either vertigo or envy (or both).
To win back the customer, two strategies coexist: the integrated enterprise or the extended enterprise. With a preference in France for the former.
An old legacy of Taylorist times, the choice of integration has nevertheless mutated somewhat. Whereas vertical integration was envisaged yesterday, today acquisitions through horizontal extension are envisaged: unable to catch up with a small, agile company creating value in adjacent markets, one buys it. The traditional customer relationship is not replaced, it is complemented, so as to offset the diversification of consumer spending with that of the company’s revenues.
Yet the alternative practice of the extended enterprise has many advantages. Because why prefer the relationship of owner to that of partner, if one manages to free oneself from the taste for “control” or even “power”?
This organisational and operational principle has been adopted in recent years, defensively, by some industrial players, particularly when market uncertainties made it too risky to keep part of the business within the legal and financial perimeter. Through “spin-offs” or other technical mechanisms, companies therefore outsourced the “risk”. And these young shoots sometimes spread their wings.
The real weakness of this choice lies in human reality. Because those who had been “spun off” always knew why they had had to leave, and when the day came, they had neither gratitude nor any wish to share their success with those who had, more or less deliberately, “driven them out”.
So, if the “exit cost” of moving from an integrated to an extended enterprise is often high in human – and economic – terms, why not keep operating as an extended enterprise, without seeking the capital-based (and, it is often believed, human) control of the integrated enterprise?
No doubt because of the cultural imprint of Taylorist thinking on many decision-makers, for whom it is “enough” to order and roll out… the very opposite of how the digital economy works – emergent, multiple, complex.
CDO: a new power struggle?
The appointment of “Chief Digital Officers” and the issues emerging around them are, and will be, revealing of companies’ ability to succeed in their digital transformation.
This new function is often placed at the highest level of the company. Is this a communication choice, to embody the company’s “modernity”? Or the sign of new struggles for “power”? The end of the 20th century saw production functions overturned by marketers – with priority given to the product the customer wanted rather than the one the company produced. Then came the governance of the financiers, with management heavily marked by short-term profitability. Will this early 21st century be that of the “digitalisers”? Clearly, the function is still to be defined. Is the CDO the successor – or the boss – of the IT director? Or the CEO’s rival?
In our world of services (including industrial ones), technological functions are, almost paradoxically, little recognised. Because tools are not everything, and the specificity (even strangeness) of “geek” skills often excludes them from decision-making – at least once the start-up stage is over and other, more “business” functions appear.
And then, “digital change” seems to be everywhere in the company: in marketing and sales, HR, finance, production… So one could not hand the “reins” of the organisation to an “IT person”, however well versed in the latest technologies! The CDO therefore seems to find their place closest to the CEO – perhaps until challenging them for it.
More than a question of hierarchy, the question that must be asked is that of role.
If digitalisation is seen as an opportunity to regain lost control, failure lies at the end of the road. It is true that “Big Data” gives rise to many fantasies: one could anticipate the desires of “customers” (external and internal) on the basis of their past behaviour, predict them and therefore control them… Beyond the moral problems this totalitarian ideology would entail, it is quite simply an unworkable utopia, which would claim to do away with free will and the intrinsic unpredictability of human systems, thanks to a “reassuring” deterministic social engineering.
Fostering the digital transformation rather than hoping (in vain) to control it
Knowing is not controlling. And digital phenomena share a characteristic radically foreign to post-Taylorist control: emergence.
Internally, introducing collaborative tools will bring no real return on investment if they are just new “communication” tools, as staff directories, internal newsletters and shared databases were… Necessary, but not enough to justify the new costs.
Externally, Big Data analysis tools, however fast, can only observe changes in practice after the fact. Because how can one control the multiplicity of interactions to which individuals, consumers or customers are subject? The difficulties – even abysses of anxiety – that Cartesian decision-makers experience in the face of the complexity of an open, interconnected and therefore unpredictable world are no doubt opportunities for merchants of certainty – but it is always a fool’s bargain.
The success of digital transformation does not rest on tools, but on the behaviours they facilitate, which have already been emerging for several years, with both the development of information technologies and – whether one likes it or not – the spread of the “democratic paradigm”: collaboration, emergence, letting go, shared leadership…
That is why, whether the function is taken on directly by the head of the company or by a CDO, digital transformation must call more on skills in fostering talent and contributions than on forceful management.
Coherence rather than control
Control kills contributions – because it breeds refusal of responsibility and fear of sanction, because it neglects recognition, and because it fuels competition and even resentment. In any case, because it leads to immobility and disengagement. And because it clearly runs counter to the talents and appetites of the “digital generation” who will live in tomorrow’s world.
In the open society that digital transformation offers and accompanies, it is better to identify and encourage contributions, internally and externally, to keep an open mind in order to spot emerging opportunities, and to guarantee agile decision-making processes.
None of this is just a matter of tools – even if they are useful, even indispensable – but of convictions, postures, and also practices that both sustain and implement the principles of action mentioned above.
Of course, a company cannot be run anarchically, and it is always essential to direct the available resources and energies in line with a strategy. But this coherence is always better guaranteed by the ownership of that strategy by as many people as possible – which means it must have been formalised and shared – than by “censors” or “guardians of the temple”. For that, one must have chosen trust, emergence and commitment: principles of management and leadership that have certainly shown how complex they are to implement, but also their extraordinary added value.
That is why “digital change”, more than a new technological phenomenon, is a new attractor for mobilisation and transformation, serving collective performance.
Leave a Reply