Effective reporting culture for digital transformation. The third in our series on transforming organizational culture for digital transformation success explores how to improve existing complex reporting cultures and engage executives to make them more effective in digital transformation (DT, DX, digital transformation).
Contents
Traditional reporting culture needs to change
He called DX a business transformation process based on digital capabilities. And the fastest thing to try is to create a digital environment. At this time, the digital environment does not end with the introduction of digital tools, but must be transformed into actual work to build a company’s digital capability. Therefore, it is important to check all the data uploaded by executives and workers, make decisions based on it, and convince internal stakeholders. There are many examples of building a digital environment at the workplace level, but in this article, I’d like to talk a little bit about reporting to executives.
People in white-collar jobs in our country write tons of reports every day. In some cases, reporting to executives or management is quite frequent. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we work to report. This reporting culture can become quite complex and time-consuming to prepare and present, especially the higher up the organization you’re reporting to.
In startups, it’s not uncommon for founders and directors to discuss and make decisions based on actual development screens or operational metrics rather than separate reports, but as the organization grows and the complexity of the work increases, it’s not always easy to make decisions through meetings and discussions alone. And the larger the organization, the more executives want to cut to the chase, and this culture isn’t going away anytime soon.
Increase efficiency by improving your reporting culture
For example, Hyundai Card is famous for its CEO’s declaration of zero PPTs and the elimination of report-based reporting formats. While many media outlets introduce this as an innovation, it’s more about focusing on the business rather than improving the reporting culture, which means not wasting time thinking about the business by decorating the report. There are many foreign companies that emphasize storytelling over PowerPoint-centric reporting. At Amazon, there’s a culture of creating a one-page virtual press release and discussing it before launching a new service. It’s about focusing on how we’re going to do business, how our business is going to be beneficial from a customer perspective, and just creating that content.
A new approach to digital transformation leadership: leverage real-time dashboards and collaboration tools
In this context, executives and leaders responsible for DX need to think differently about their reporting and meeting culture. If you have a culture of regular reports, reduce the frequency and have a dashboard with real-time status and check in or receive reports on an occasional basis. In other words, put the digital tools you are using in the field directly on the screen and discuss them right away.
Typically, DXers are used to working in the IT industry and are more comfortable writing in a collaborative document like a wiki than in a separate document. If management follows suit, it can save a lot of time, from creating documents to scheduling reports to waiting on hold. If you’re already using collaboration and communication tools like Google Workspace, Slack, or Microsoft Teams to do most of your work, you can continue to use these channels.
If you’ve launched a mobile service or implemented an IT system, you probably have dashboards that your staff utilize. These dashboards are organized so that you can see at a glance the metrics that are important to your service or business. You can drill down to specific data and even current status if you need to. This could be something like server operations in the public cloud, or it could be revenue or key metrics for your core business. These dashboards can be used across all DX-related activities, collaborations with other organizations, and organizing data to pull out key metrics.
Accelerate DX execution with executive engagement
An executive might make the following request to the DX organization Create a dashboard that executives can access and view directly. You can even go a step further and put it on a monitor in the office to see the initiation of different changes in real time. It’s a great way to accelerate your DX efforts.