Organisations must be willing to transform or risk irrelevance. Transformation is not just about incremental change. It requires fundamental shifts in an organisation’s value proposition; how it competes and operates.
Enterprise-wide transformation can be driven by several factors:
- Disruptive external forces, customer preferences, or regulatory requirements impacting the viability of the business
- Business model obsolescence over time due to increasing competition or arrival of substitutes
- Technology advances making the operating model obsolete or uncompetitive
- Unrealised synergies or significant inefficiencies within and between business units in the portfolio
- Misalignment between stakeholder interests, or the introduction of new leadership with a different vision
The Enterprise wide transformation can sometimes involve acquisitions, divestitures, or joint ventures as the organisation seeks to make foundational changes. Though the need for transformation may be well understood, delivering transformation programs is rarely straightforward. They usually complex, and need to be delivered while ‘keeping the lights on’, thereby stretching resources and facing considerable internal resistance.