The journey towards building a knowledge-based economy and achieving e-governance and a digitalized society has been adopted as a core component of the national strategies of many nations. This initiative requires the adoption of state-of-the-art technological infrastructure that is both at par and fully compatible with other countries around the globe. In pursuit of such a goal, many new fascinating technological developments such as blockchain, cloud computing, the internet of things, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics, among others, have become ubiquitous. Particularly, the exponential rise in the capacity of generative AI is touted as a game-changer and has drawn substantial interest from policymakers, organizations, and individuals. However, while pursuing the goal of successful digital transformation, it is critical to ensure that the digital strategies among large organizations in Oman do not fall into the trap of pursuing shiny new objects. Therefore, this calls for a disciplined approach toward safeguarding the effectiveness of digital transformation strategies by paying attention to three key issues: (i) Battling ignorance, (ii) overcoming fears, and (iii) avoiding guesswork.
Battling ignorance requires the recognition that many senior-level executives in organizations are not clear about what exactly digital transformation is. They tend to have a superficial understanding of the phenomenon and are not aware of the differences between digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation. The concepts of digitization and digitalization are all stages of the digital transformation journey, but they are quite distinct from each other. Digitization refers to the conversion of analog data to digital form, whereas digitalization is about deploying digital technologies into the systems and processes of an organization. Finally, digital transformation is referred to as a strategy that is aimed at a complete transformation of an organization from its traditional ways of managing processes to a completely digitalized one. Due to a general lack of awareness of the above, key decision-makers in organizations often fall into the trap of adopting new digital hardware and software, that are hyped up by the media, without understanding how the “new shiny object” fits in with their current digital transformation strategy. At the core is the issue that such senior decision-makers often don’t truly understand how new technologies such as generative AI or blockchain can add value to their organization. Hence, it is imperative to ensure that senior decision-makers frequently attend seminars and workshops where they familiarize themselves with new technologies to identify how they fit in with their digital strategies.
On the other side of the spectrum is the fear of losing out by not adopting a new technology into the organization. The need for key decision-makers to overcome the fear of being left out by other first movers is also an essential factor that needs to be ensured to avoid jumping into a new technology without analyzing the advantages and perils of mindless adoption of a new system. Thus, without having clarity of how it is likely to add value to the present digital transformation journey of the organization, executives need to avoid impulsive decisions about technology adoption.
Finally, stakeholders of both public sector and private sector organizations expect their senior managers to be agile in implementing their digital strategies. In this process, often managers feel pressured to rely on guesswork and make wholesale adoption of new digital technologies without doing sufficient evidence-based research to ensure the cost-benefit of such technology. Therefore, without sufficient empirical studies that show the clear benefit of the new technology to the organization and its alignment with the current digital strategy, those in charge of digital transformation must avoid such pitfalls.
The above three factors are crucial for senior management of public and private organizations, to avoid any obstacles towards achieving the aspirations of the nation in transforming the country into a technologically advanced knowledge-based economy. At the core of this is to stick to a well-designed and robust digital strategy that needs to be flexible and dynamic yet cautious in adopting any new digital technologies without thorough understanding and analysis.
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