Fear of failure a digital transformation barrier

The usual reasons why digital transformation projects fail to fly are usually associated with budget and skills and there are plenty of pieces of recent research pointing fingers at both of those issues as ones the channel needs to overcome.

There is another problem though which will need more than just a conversation about flexible payments and underlining the strength and depth of a channel player's engineering team.

KCOM has uncovered internal resistance in the form of a lack of stakeholder support as a major factor explaining why some customers are not keen to innovate.

Plenty of customers (43%) are looking at digital transformation as a way to increase their competitiveness and 32% are planning to allocate at least a fifth of their IT budgets to projects.

But the survey found that many companies were worried about failing and that fear was holding back a 'have a go' mentality that was needed to innovate and move beyond well established approaches.

“It is positive to see that organisations are embracing cloud technology as the path to innovation, and they recognise some of the challenges holding them back. However, too many are stopped from giving their all to innovation projects by fear of failure," said Stephen Long, managing director at KCOM Enterprise.

"Innovation, by its very nature, involves pushing the boundaries of what is known and understood. Organisations must accept that failure plays an important role in doing this. Only by obeying Samuel Beckett’s dictum to ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ can companies truly unlock the value of the cloud and new ways of working," he added "Fortune favours the bold, so companies need to prepare to fail, and build in a fast failure stage into all their innovation projects.”

Vendors are doing their bit to reduce the possibility of failure with more producing vertical ready bundles of apps and services that resellers can take out to market.