It's not all about technology

If you’ve been in the Digital business for a few years, you’ve seen it before — the project or vendor that promise a technology recipe to solve all of the organization’s problems. Technology X, Y, or Z will fix everything, and the hype lasts for a while, but in the end has not been as impactful as people expected.

How do you cut through that and make better decisions?

The problem: starting with technology

In many organizations, the conversation starts with the technology to implement rather than the problem to solve. That overemphasis on technology - many times fostered by vendors - means everything else that matters for an initiative to succeed — and actually create business value — gets overlooked.

Process, People, Data, and Technology

A useful framework when kicking off any initiative is to assess the health of these four factors. Note that Data is called out separately here — in the past it was folded into Process, but in the AI era it deserves its own focus.

Process: Is the process defined and mature? Has it been documented and agreed upon? Does everyone follow the same process, or does each business unit have their own version of it?

People: Do people understand the why behind the change? Are they going to support it, or just tolerate it as one more initiative? Are there any real incentives to drive adoption?

Data: Is the data that flows through the process complete, accurate, and high quality?

Technology: Is the technology mature enough for production use? Does it fit the team’s skills and the organization’s operating model?

You can have the best technology available — but without solid process, good data, and people who are bought in, it won’t deliver the results you expect.

But won’t AI just solve all of this?

AI is data-intensive. Even with the best model available, the right people and process, if the data going in is incomplete or inaccurate, the outputs won’t be reliable. AI amplifies what you already have — good or bad.