The Top Barriers to Digital Transformation in Australia

With the remit of Heads of Digital Transformation shifting from strategic innovation to core business operations, they must adapt to doing business in this new experience-centric future. 

ADAPT Digital Edge 2021 hosted 130 ADAPT surveyed 120 Heads of Digital Transformation and CX leading organisations responsible for 34% of national GDP in 2021 and over 8% of the Australian workforce.  

At the event, ADAPT’s Director of Strategic Research, Matt Boon, shared findings from a recent survey of digital transformation leaders to highlight their collective challenges and priorities.   

To unlock the full keynote video and access an entire catalogue of ADAPT’s expert presentations, localised research, case studies, downloadable data and community interviews, speak with a Senior Research Consultant today. 

Transcription: 

We see change management being a major issue for many of us.  

Clearly, over the years, really driving change and effecting change amongst our people and our organisations is that perennial challenge.” 

We’ve really achieved so much change over the last 14 to 16 months.  

We’ve learned a lot about how we can really rally ourselves and our employees, customers around common challenges and objectives to drive the changes we need to make.  

If one thing the pandemic has taught us is when we have that common challenge to overcome, we really can affect a lot of change within our organisations as well.”  

We see the absence of a prescribed digital culture and mindset coming up quite strongly as well.  

Within our organisations and amongst our people, we need to do a much better job of enabling and empowering them to understand why we need to make some of these changes to processes, systems, and tools to really help us shift that digital transformation needle within organisations.  

We often talk at ADAPT that digital transformation, for so many of us, today really is a given.  

It’s what we do is we think about this concept of the new normal within this pandemic affected the world.  

Digital transformation really is the new normal of how we deliver services and capabilities within our organisations. 

It needs to increasingly be about how we consistently execute those transformation journeys and really think about the experiences we’re trying to deliver for our employees and our customers.

We still see interdepartmental collaboration and communication as a major challenge within many of our organisations as well.” 

We have found that during the last 14 months, we are collaborating very well within our own cohorts of teams and groups.  

It has been increasingly challenging to expand that collaboration and communication to wider parts of the organisation, particularly as we find ourselves in these very remote and disparate environments many of our employees were working within.  

When we think about this challenge around digital culture and mindset, the levels of digital maturity within our organisations, particularly at the leadership and board level, remains a key challenge for many Australian organisations.”

That comes up pretty much very strongly across the CIO survey that we did earlier this year and for CFOs. That’s holding us back in terms of being able to deliver on some of those initiatives.  

As a result, that’s driving those challenges around the budget to drive those transformational initiatives.  

If we can’t really articulate effectively to the senior levels of the organisations why we need to embark on some of these digitisation strategies, getting the budget to do that will be increasingly challenging for us. 

To unlock the full keynote video and access an entire catalogue of ADAPT’s expert presentations, localised research, case studies, downloadable data and community interviews, speak with a Senior Research Consultant today.