4: Analyze the Gaps

Digital transformation is a journey that differs for each organization. All the interviewed experts talked about the need for customization. Industries, such as apparel, construction, furniture, lingerie, software services and sports, face different customer needs and competitive pressures. Most importantly, each organization has its own objectives, culture, structure and obstacles. For the CEO in our opening example, the overfocus on data and data scientists prevented leadership from reimagining the value the company could provide to customers through digital transformation and redesigning the human resources to support this new value.

Therefore, we highly recommend starting with a gap analysis. Following our nested adaptive cycles (NAC) framework, this concerns both the gap in how businesses interact with customers (the small and fast turning wheels) and the gap in how top leadership is thinking about change management in the context of digital transformation. Therefore, in this chapter, we offer tried-and-true approaches to: