“When reviewing organizations that have undergone or are going through digital transformation, it has been shown that far less attention is dedicated to addressing the people and cultural aspects of change management and change leadership than the processes and technology behind the transformation. Businesses must adopt the “PPT” mantra, which is putting People ahead of Process and Technology. That said, conversations about managing employee experience as a core component of digital transformation have risen in recent years.”

– Sattar Bawany (2023)

“People First Over Process and Technology” (“PPT”) Mantra

To evolve, organizations need to develop continuous change capabilities. For organizations seeking to scale and grow, not only should their Leaders inspire change and are effective “change agents.” Still, they also need to adopt an integrative and future-focused approach to their strategic redesign, allowing them to integrate structure, people, process, and technology (PPT) as leverage points to drive growth. Engaging leaders at all levels aligning their growth and disruptive mindsets and providing the relevant incentives to reinforce new behaviors go a long way toward executing large-scale organizational design efforts and growing the company.

Digital transformation initiatives require people, processes, and technology (PPT), which refers to the methodology in which the disruptive leader’s role as the project leader is to achieve the balance of people, process, and technology, to drive action:

  1. People perform specific work for an organization using processes (and often, technology) to streamline and improve these processes. The people are the project leader and his team who do the work. Without people, nothing can happen.
  2. Processes could be viewed as a series of actions or steps that need to happen to achieve a particular goal. People are ineffective without processes in place to support their decisions.
  3. Technology will not make existing problems go away without the people and processes around to support it. Too often, companies invest in technology and try to retrofit the people and processes, but that is backward logic.

Many digital transformation efforts do not achieve their desired results because they concentrate on the process improvement strategies with the technology as an enabler but they ignore the people aspect of the change initiative.

DT/DX is not just about disruption or technology. It’s about creating and delivering a compelling value proposition that focuses on the integration of the three pillars of strategy: people, process, and technology (PPT). It is the reimagining of the business in the digital era with an obsession with the customers and with everyone adopting a customer-centric mindset (which begins and ends with how the organization thinks about and engages with its customers). DT/DX also focuses on delivering value for various stakeholders (particularly its customers) and continuously innovating and acquiring relevant digital capabilities in response to the rapidly changing highly disruptive and digital-driven marketplace.

Reference: Sattar Bawany (2023), Leadership in Disruptive Times: Negotiating the New Balance. Business Expert Press (BEP) LLC, New York, NY. Abstract available at: https://www.disruptiveleadership.institute/second-edition-book/