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Recent studies have found that the vast majority of digital transformation efforts fail
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People are the secret sauce that make an overhaul successful, one Unisys exec said
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Part of pulling in the right people is transforming company culture – and that comes with bonus AI benefits
Digital transformation isn’t easy. In fact, it’s actually so hard that two different studies from Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey found a whopping 70% of transformation efforts end in failure.
According to Unisys SVP and GM of Cloud, Applications and Infrastructure Solutions Manju Naglapur a company’s people play a make-or-break break role in determining the outcome of modernization efforts.
Naglapur told Silverlinings upskilling existing workers and attracting top talent are two of the most important things a company should do when undertaking a digital transformation project.
When it comes to upskilling workers for cloud computing roles, Naglapur said the ideal candidates within an enterprise will be those who are “inquisitive,” who have an “automation-first mindset” and those who understand the premise of full-stack development. He added enterprises should be assessing candidates for a range of roles spanning DevSecOps for the cloud and application layers as well as service reliability engineering.
For instance, employees who are good at scripting can be cherry picked for upskilling to Terraform and other modern scripting languages that will help with automating and shifting workloads to the cloud.
And for the application layer “you want to make sure these guys not only think of their own siloed application but they start thinking about the PaaS layer, the IaaS layer, because this is extremely important as we move into cloud computing,” Naglapur said.
A July 2023 study from McKinsey backed up Naglapur’s assertion that upskilling is important. That report found top performing enterprises were more likely to be effective at training and developing talent.
Bringing in the big guns
However, enterprises will need to do more than spruce up employee skillsets to really make a go at digital transformation. They’ll also need to reel in top talent in a highly competitive landscape, Naglapur said. And to do that, they need to develop the right kind of reputation.
“Attracting talent means you want to be the kind of destination these associates are looking for,” he explained.
That means not only aligning corporate values and processes with the current workforce’s expectations but also becoming a hub for innovation.
While hyperscalers and other big names may swallow up top tier talent, the second tier workers tend to gravitate toward companies that are visionaries, Naglapur said.
Changing a company’s reputation is hard, he added, but it can be done.
He pointed to a mid-tier financial services organization which previously completely outsourced their IT and thus was not seen as a landing spot for tech talent. That company took a top-down approach to overhauling its stance, bringing on a CIO, VPs and other executives with automation-first mindsets. These leaders left no room for things to be done the traditional way and within a few years, the company became one of the first to jump into Amazon Web Services.
That company transformed itself and became a marquis speaker and destination for cloud workers, he said.
Again, McKinsey likewise highlighted the criticality of attracting and retaining top talent for digital transformations.
It’s worth noting that McKinsey also found companies with innovative cultures also have a leg up on the competition when it comes to generative artificial intelligence (AI).
That ain’t nothing to sniff at in our currently AI-obsessed world.