Business to Digital Transformation: A Proposed Framework for Achieving Business Intelligence Alignment

With digital disruption comes an emphasis on the importance of organisation alignment, especially prior to any proposed digital transformation (DT). Analysts project that over 70% of the $1.3trillion annual spend on DT will... [ view full abstract ]

With digital disruption comes an emphasis on the importance of organisation alignment, especially prior to any proposed digital transformation (DT). Analysts project that over 70% of the $1.3trillion annual spend on DT will not succeed as intended. Many enterprise transformations begin with brave ambition, yet many CXOs delay making “go / no-go” decisions due to what the authors term the “Business Intelligence (B.I.) Accessibility Principle”. This refers to the high cost of attaining enterprise-wide understanding, or group-cognition, to sustain the complex changes required.

Strategic Management cannot merely plan to implement and deliver on strategic vision. Leadership need more adaptable frameworks to pre-emptively support enterprise engagement and alignment if we are to succeed in transformation. Action Design Research (ADR) can aid our thinking, helping conceptualise and examine alignment frameworks critically. ADR can support Management to quickly ‘sense-categorise-respond’ to both organisational and individual needs prior to transformation decisions. These needs are typically ‘dark-data”, or data hardly being analysed, to improve decision making. The Gap-Map framework helps expose such tacit knowledge, key to enterprise-wide transformation success. It allows management to predict the propensity of the organisation for change, and address change through focused behavioural intervention. This paper’s contribution is a B.I. framework where leaders now invest focused time and resources in DT through earlier understanding of potential impacts. This enables managers to strategically utilise behavioural intervention to enable multilateral group cognition and collaboration earlier. Gap-Map value creation is through flagging potentially costly issues and opportunities earlier, allowing transformation initiatives the propensity to succeed.