Digital

By Fiona Czerniawska.

“Transformation is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think strategy consulting is a big deal, but that’s just peanuts to transformation."

If Douglas Adams was alive and well today, and writing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Consulting, he’d probably have said this. Indeed, one of Adams’ most brilliant ideas, the infinite improbability drive—a faster-than-light drive based on quantum theory—would almost certainly have been deployed whizzing consultants from one side of the transformation universe to another*.

We’ve written before on this blog about the dangers posed by the extent to which transformation, like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal—another Adams invention—has been gobbling up traditional consulting services.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

2017 saw a huge leap in the proportion of consulting work that was badged “digital transformation”. Some of that is genuinely new work, fuelled by technology that does, sometimes, appear to make our lives at work and home miraculously better. But most of the growth is coming from the reconfiguration of existing consulting services—strategy, operational improvement, even HR and risk. You don’t improve supply chains anymore, but digitally transform them; your HR function isn’t streamlined so much as transformed.

We could waste a lot of time arguing whether all this work is actually transformative, but that’s not the point I want to focus on here. My worry—and I always find something to worry about—is that it feels as though transformation is getting too big in conceptual, rather than material, terms. Some of the clients I’ve spoken to recently seem dazed, almost paralysed, by the scale of what might be achievable.

By Alison Huntington.

I recently interviewed a consultant who was telling me about a digital transformation programme he’d worked on with one of Britain’s police forces. As part of the programme, each front-line officer was given a tablet to replace the traditional policeman’s notebook. The technology would mean accurate digital records, fewer hours lost to paperwork, the ability to update cases on the go, and myriad other benefits. Except that it didn’t. The consultant went out on the beat one day and watched as an officer took out his tablet … and proceeded to use it as a clipboard to lean his paper notebook against while he jotted down his notes with an old-fashioned biro.

It’s just one of many examples that illustrate how the success of transformation depends on people, not just new technology. So what do HR clients—the people in charge of the people—make of the consultants trying to help them?