“Digital transformation” is one of those phrases that leadership and MBA-types love to throw around, especially when they think it will help make them sound like they know something about technology. Along with “innovation,” I’d say it’s one of the most hyped-up—and least understood—terms making the rounds among nonprofits and cultural organizations these days.
So, let’s break it down.
First, “digital.” As most of us have probably experienced first-hand, it’s really difficult to disentangle our “digital” life from our life life. Not only have our phones become the linchpin to the majority of our daily activities, but just about everything else, from signing up for an event at your public library to shopping for groceries to getting your car serviced all require some kind of digital presence. The same is true for our workplaces and our visitor experiences. For example, while a curator might feel strongly that certain exhibitions should be experienced without technological mediation, the fact remains that most people are pretty well tethered to their smartphones and chances are they’re going to take them out of their pocket at some point during their visit. So I think it’s only fair that when we’re talking about “digital transformation,” we’re really talking about “organizational transformation” or “visitor engagement transformation” or just straight up “transformation.”
Which leads me to the “transformation” part of the phrase. True digital transformation is not surface-level, and it’s not something that happens overnight. In the case of “digital transformation,” It’s not just about acquiring a new software system or launching a new website. It means changes in workflow, and changes to culture. It means changing the way you work, changing the way you develop your staff, changing the way you think about your audiences, changing the way you think about budgeting and resource allocation. It means leaders (and board members) thinking differently about strategy and goals and risk—and it might even mean going through a period of time when the future looks less certain than it did before.
Digital transformation—at least how I’m defining it—doesn’t necessarily require a massive budget or loads of employees with advanced technical skills. It does, however, require the willingness and ability to approach strategic decisions holistically and integrated with digital ways of working, rather than including them as an afterthought. It requires an understanding of what technology can (and can’t) do, and it requires a culture that embraces flexibility, complexity, ambiguity, and experimentation. Organizations that are stuck in a command-and-control mentality, those whose cultures are based on hierarchy, gatekeeping, and risk avoidance, will likely find “digital transformation” elusive and difficult to achieve in a meaningful way. In those cases, transformation (digital or otherwise) may take some serious shocks to the system (new leadership, reorganizations, group therapy) to really take hold.
So digital transformation is really just change—albeit a potentially very fundamental and complex change—intended to embed digital tools, thought processes, and skills more deeply in our organizations. Not to the exclusion of other tools, thought processes, and skills, but as a viable, top-of-mind, strategic choice we are able to consciously make and deploy in the service of our mission.