Apparently there is a substantial gap in a lot of organizations between vision and execution. Ideas are everywhere, yet game changing concepts and their execution are rare. There is a major discrepancy between the ability to generate ideas and the reality of bringing those ideas to market in a relevant way.

Also, some of the challenges are related to definitions. A lot of people think that innovation is creating something completely new, something earth shattering. But this is rarely doable and would overwhelm most people in an organization. Innovation depends on including everyone in an organization so trying something that leaves most people behind is not going to work.

Talking about being inclusive; some companies already realized that it can be tough for their IT leaders and their C-suite peers to generate a culture of creativity. Being a bit controversial, the organizational structure of many companies makes sure that innovation fails. There are company leaders who have visionary ideas and then there are operations and support structure (this is where most people put IT) that don’t want any change and thus not any growth. If this is true, leaders can become entrenched in their belief that their way is best, and they do not care about the collateral damage that comes with it. Maybe they are even unconscious of the destruction this behavior creates.

Business leaders often want what they want and once they have thrown their ideas onto the table expect the rest of the organization to follow and to execute. But what happens if people are not included? They don’t consider themselves as part of the project and the excitement and behave accordingly. Have you ever tried to fight the inertia of operations and support structure? Well, I can tell you that you will fail. And that’s one of the major reasons of the gap between innovative ideas and execution. If people feel (and are) excluded they won’t buy in and even worse, will not contribute.

But we are living in a world where innovation is based on the advances of technology, means innovation is powered by technology. So, what good can come from excluding technical experts from strategy and / or innovation discussions and decisions. To the contrary, they need to be included from day one.

However, there needs to be common ground between business and IT leaders. And it’s obvious that technical experts are the ones that need to move because you can hardly expect from a business leader to understand technology more than from a pure user perspective. This means for the majority of IT leaders to learn to be more in-tune with the business, more collaborative, and with better soft skills.

Technical experts need to “get in the boat” with business leaders to ensure success. This requires understanding each other and as I have said above, it’s on the IT experts to learn a bit about operations and business to be able to sit at the table and to be relevant.

If, and only if IT leaders start to understand the mechanics of business and manage to be heard, companies will be able to overcome the obstacles to the digital business opportunity. And the most important obstacle from my experience is being able to think and act effectively as an organization.

Once leadership manages to overcome this obstacle they need to address and solve other barriers that unfortunately exist and are well known such as the cultural and skill hurdles to becoming more digital. Corporate culture remains one of the most stubborn obstacles to the kind of cross-functional change and restructuring that must take place in most organizations.

We also need to look at legacy as most companies are no digital natives. In short, companies need to solve the legacy IT mountain, for example aging legacy systems, bureaucracy and over-centralization, years of underinvestment, traditional data centers, cost center focus, legacy skills, etc.

The longer version is that we have to deal with two main areas. Most companies have not nearly invested as much as their technology driven counterparts, an underinvestment of up to 50% in IT year over year is not uncommon compared to digital natives. Also, software development and legacy enterprise IT architecture happens in circles, but they are usually completely unknown outside of the IT department. We are talking about technical debt when year over year the simple “upgrading” option is taken and not the smarter, better choice for the long term. Usually a result of underinvestment.

This technical debt has to be paid before digital transformation can take place. Some of it can be ripped out and be replaced during the transformation process but much of it like fragmented databases and systems, time consuming manual processes, etc. cannot easily be fixed. What makes technical debt so dangerous is that it’s not visible in the balance sheet of a company. So, the board usually has no clue how bad it is. Do you see the pattern? Yet again, how can a company deal with technical debt that needs to be addressed when talking about modernization and embracing digital if the IT experts are not included in the conversation?

And as before, IT and board members will have a hard time to communicate if they don’t understand each other so IT experts will have to learn how to talk to the board. In many cases it can help to engage a few external experts who need to focus on two major areas. First, make sure IT knows how to talk business and therefore talk to all other stakeholders of the company and second guide all stakeholders on their (initial) steps towards winning in a digital world. This includes but is not limited to start measuring technical debt, have a frank discussion about overall IT spending using benchmarks, get going with identifying use cases and lighthouse projects and don’t become frustrated if some of them fail. Winning in a digital world requires to listen to change agents and to take some risk.