The business world and customer expectations are constantly changing, and digital transformation has become a key driver of business success across all industries. Digital transformation is about leveraging available technologies to address business challenges and seize opportunities. When broken down, digital transformation is essentially about improving IT management to eliminate problem areas and prepare your IT infrastructure to face business challenges. And that involves implementing IT changes that help your organization apply new technologies to current business and IT processes.
These changes can be as simple as moving collaborative applications to the cloud for better operational efficiency, or adopting a mobile-first approach for a better consumer experience. Despite their apparent simplicity, these changes come with their own logistical challenges. If a change is not implemented correctly, your organization risks taking one step forward and two steps back.
The failure of a major bank’s mobile app upgrade in December 2018 is a perfect example of how not to implement change. The bank’s plan to introduce a new and improved mobile banking app was a great idea and a necessity. But as soon as it was launched, the new application had problems. The bank introduced the new application when it had already abandoned the old one. As the new app failed to work, thousands of customers were unable to access their bank accounts through it. To make matters worse, communication about a fix to the new app was extremely limited, which angered customers a lot. L’
It can be seen that the bank failed at various stages of the proposed change: launching the new application when it was not ready to be deployed, lack of transparency and failure to communicate to end users the associated downtime updating, and no back-up plan in case of failure. This is certainly not how you would want to implement your change.
This is where change management comes in; it helps you manage the various changes in your organization and provides you with a process to effectively deploy the changes without affecting the rest of your organization. Change management reduces the risk of disruptions similar to those experienced by the bank.
In this guide, we’ll cover the what, why, and how of change management. You will learn how to help your organization adapt to industry trends through effective change.