It's no secret that organisational culture is as important as building a strong brand, sustaining and increasing customer base. Organisational growth heavily relies on strong company culture based on the foundations of equality, integrity and accountability, to name a few.
It's through the development of technological transformations that yet a new aspect of organisational culture is evolving. You may have heard of the term 'digital culture' which particularly relates to the manner by which organisations undertake digital transformations. To differentiate between company's wide culture and digital culture, we're inspecting the famous stories of Uber and Wells Fargo and their respective outcomes of culture neglect. In comparison, we discuss the outcome of digital culture neglect in software implementation projects. While both aspects view culture responsibility differently, they both share common denominators rooted in the need for cultural guidance, regardless of the industry of focus.
Cultural Awareness
Who doesn't know Uber, a company that grew rapidly by tackling a strong demand of fast mobility services. Uber encountered a culture crisis spanning from 2013 to 2020, which led to majority board voting calling the CEO to resign. From complaints on sexism, toxic workplace culture to cutthroat business tactics, Uber faced multiple lawsuits and public embarrassments strongly suggesting that company's culture wasn't guided nor controlled, leaving Uber drivers left to their own devices when it comes to cultural conduct.
The financial institution Wells Fargo also had its share of failure to meet ethical targets due to lack of culture building and guidance. According to HBR, Former employees described a “soul-crushing” culture at Wells Fargo. Extreme sales goals and management intimidation pressured employees to take all sales avenues, whether legal or not. From soul-crushing to soul-searching, this crisis led to the reimagining of sales culture, the elimination of retail bank sales goals and to the firing of over 5,000 employees for the illegal behaviour.
Digital Culture Awareness
While the impact of lack of digital culture awareness failed to reach the gossip columns, and while implementation disaster stories are not as sassy as the Uber and Wells Fargo stories, one mustn't overlook the potential detrimental outcome that cultural-led digital transformation failures may have on the overall organisational financial standing, particularly given the heavy investment that is at stake.
CIO magazine concurs - with ERP and CRM applications at the heart of many a companies' operations, the consequences of a failed software rollout can be serious, including shareholder lawsuits and financial meltdown.
Research conducted by Wong B. and Hasan S. of the University of Technology, Sydney, investigating software companies in Bangladesh, suggests that the lack of cultural awareness acted as an implementation barrier, affecting the business goals sought by the organisations.
BCG magazine dedicated an article to the impact of culture on digital transformations, stating "It's Not Digital Transformation Without a Digital Culture". Assessing 40 digital transformation projects, BCG found that the reporting of breakthrough and strong financial performance was five times greater among those organisations that placed great emphasis on culture. BCG's conclusion was that by ignoring culture, an organization risks transformation failure.
Software implementations are complex, involved and costly.
A commitment to digital culture awareness is a mandatory first step, as meeting implementations targets is a difficult task in its own right, with looming hurdles and obstacles awaiting to fail even the savvy of implementers. According to CNET, the growing number of brand-name firms reporting big troubles with their multimillion-dollar projects is continually surfacing. Hershey Foods, Whirlpool, Allied Waste Industries and maker of Gore-Tex W.L. Gore & Associates were among the reported companies. CIO magazine tells the unfortunate stories of famous ERP implementation disasters. Companies such as Mission Produce, Invacare, J&J snack Foods, Leaseplan and others ended up with disastrous outcomes while attempting to implement their multimillion ERP systems with huge losses reported.
Culture focus in the world of technology perhaps means different things than in the world of Uber and Wells Fargo, however they all speak of being culturally aware and culturally responsible, whether it be digitally or socially. In the world of digital transformations, being culturally aware means the development of organisational digital integrity, facing the real questions concerning readiness for digital change, a topic which will be discussed in following articles by PMCi.
Case Study
Leading software implementation projects for major organisations for over 20 years provided us with the privilege to witness first-hand different digital cultures, and most critically, understand how different levels of digital cultures awareness affect organisational readiness and aptitude for digital change.
Placing great importance on the factor of culture as a vehicle to producing successful transformational outcomes, our approach to building strong and long-lasting customer relationships starts by learning of our client's management approach and cultural guidelines. Our strong commitment to accountability is at the heart of our engagement, as we view our consultancy role instrumental to bottom-up cultural building and vital to positively driving success in digital transformations. The cliche "it takes two to tango", isn't failing us when describing cultural responsibility though. Our clients' equally vested interest and commitment to digitally evolve is an imperative ingredient in building digital resilience and elevating the scales of readiness.
In a recent digital transformation project, implementing a 3rd party Oracle CRM product, a healthcare organisation was taking a huge leap, from manual processes to the state-of-the-art software implementation, which was to digitally manage all patients' relationship data and processes. The admitted huge gap in company's digital culture, aptitude and attitude for change was at the heart of our initial discussions following our due diligence of the risk and its potential mitigation strategies. It was evident that without the proper elevation of company's digital culture, digital knowledge and attitude for digital change, we were to stumble upon the anticipated roadblocks down the implementation road, risking our ability to deliver our KPIs and meeting the pre-defined thresholds of success. Responsibly mitigating the risks prior to commencing the digital transformation allowed us to build the bridge that minimised the identified gaps and arrive at our desired outcome without fail.
Conclusion
Culture awareness is an important topic of discussion that is often suffering great neglect resulting in failure to meet organisational goals at great costs. Digital culture awareness is crucial to software implementation and assimilation success. Being digitally aware means elevating the levels of organisational digital integrity and facing the important questions concerning aptitude and attitude towards digital transformations.
More from PMCi about the meaning of digital culture and how to get there in following articles.
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