In an article titled “Digital transformation: Business modernization requires a new mindset,” Karen Roby of TechRepublic interviews Brian Solis (described as a “futurist”) about the hurdles that companies must overcome while working through a digital transformation.

A video of the nine-and-a-half minute interview appears atop the page, followed by an edited transcript.

Some highlights from Solis:

“Digital transformation means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I’ve been covering it for the better part of a decade now. Originally, digital transformation really was about migrating to the cloud and modernizing a lot of business infrastructure to essentially allow companies, or organizations, to be more agile and scalable as new technologies come and go. But I think that, in and of itself, was limiting, it was an initial hurdle because it didn’t necessarily give digital transformation a sense of purpose. It just gave it a sense of a roadmap, essentially, of technologies to adopt and test and then scale.”

“One of the challenges when I study things like innovation, that I hear about, is that culture is actually one of the biggest inhibitors of all things, all progress. Sometimes when I interview executives around culture or innovation or digital transformation, I sometimes feel like I’m not an analyst, that I’m a therapist. A lot of executives actually want to share their frustrations, and one of the frustrations, especially with more, let’s just say, legacy-oriented organizations, I’ll hear about millennials all the time. And then also the coming of centennials. In that they do want to work differently, they do think differently, and infrastructures, and also models, don’t necessarily support that way of thinking and way of working. The consumerization of technology, it hasn’t just affected millennials or the younger workforce, it’s affected all of us.”

“If we can look at the customer journey, we can see exactly how mobile and social and the app economy and all of these different things are coming into the picture and we can see what’s broken. You can point digital transformation, or at least the modernization of technology, right at things that are going to have immediate ROI so that we could attach some meaningful metrics to at least the early digital transformation initiatives. So that while you’re migrating things to the cloud, while you’re doing bigger, more infrastructure-focused investments, we can also look at other investments across the journey, across functions, that are going to have immediate payoffs and that are actually smaller in their efforts.”

Read the entire article here: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/digital-transformation-business-modernization-requires-a-new-mindset/