London (UK) – 17 November, 2011 – Commenting on research released by Capgemini/MIT showing that two-thirds of global enterprise companies are failing to evolve into digital enterprises, social email provider harmon.ie says that the human element is to blame for this issue.

 According to David Lavenda, Vice President for Marketing and Product Strategy, the Capgemini Consulting/MIT report is quite correct in identifying that people and culture are the biggest barriers to digital transformation.

 “While ineffective IT is also blamed, I think that the term needs to be revised to ‘disruptive IT’, as the problem really stems from the issue that slick marketers have brainwashed senior execs into thinking that the path to digital transformation is a disruptive, revolutionary path, rather than an evolutionary process,” Lavenda said.

 If the IT marketing people are to be believed, he adds, senior execs need to rip out their existing mission-critical tools like email and documents, and replace them with relatively unproven technologies such as blogs, wikis and allied next-generation tools.

Lavenda explained that this is not digital transformation - but digital disruption - and only serves to alienate managers and their staff, as this notion of upheaval is enough to scare off all but the most adventurous CIOs.

And, he says, the larger the company, the more there is to lose.

“Expecting workers, managers, and organizations to make significant changes in the way they work is a big risk, because people are reluctant to change,” he explained.  “In the history of innovation, the ‘revolutionary’ approach often fails, because it doesn’t take the human factor into account.”

Study co-author Andrew McAfee directly applies this aversion to change to the use of the new collaboration tools, saying “you should never underestimate the fondness of people and organizations for the status quo.”

“The solution to this seemingly intractable problem starts with Professors McAfee’s advice to technologists, which is to start thinking in terms of ‘busy people with short attention spans, who have a lot to get done and who can always reach for email,” Lavenda said.

In lieu of a rip-and-replace strategy, Lavenda advises companies to take baby steps by building on the tools your organisation already has – namely email, calendaring, and document management systems.

”Building on people’s familiar’s tools is a great way of easing them into new technologies. Change is hard because people don’t like to change the way they work - they love the status quo. And this is where the `baby steps’ approach comes in – people need to learn to walk in the digital world before they can run,” says Lavenda.

“For example, using social email technology such as harmon.ie as a launchpad for integrating new collaboration capabilities into people’s existing workflows eases SharePoint users into the digital age. A case in point: research has shown that, whilst approaching 80% of firms have invested in Microsoft SharePoint, only 20% of staff use it on a daily basis (Source: Forrester).  Using social email products like harmon.ie to get people to automatically upload documents to SharePoint when they send email attachments is one very simple way to integrate two existing technologies to create a new collaboration dynamic, without changing user behaviour,” he said.

“By minimizing the need for workers to change their work habits, while mitigating the financial risk in investing in new and unproven technologies, a fail-safe methodology for embracing the digital transformation can be created and adoption barriers can be removed,” he added.  “As workers and managers see the value of digital collaboration, add functionality and social connections to the mix, enabling people to become more productive and find colleagues to help boost collaboration.  “That’s how enterprises using social email have increased end user SharePoint adoption from 20 or 30 percent to as high as 80 percent in just a few months.”

” The psychology of evolutionary change is far more productive than a `rip and replace’ approach, because it assimilates the worker psyche with collaboration goals. Minimizing the need for workers and managers to change their daily work habits, while mitigating the financial risk in investing in new and unproven technologies also stands a greater chance of success and is a win-win situation for all concerned, concluded Lavenda.

For more on harmon.ie: www.harmon.ie

For more on the Capgemini report: http://www.capgemini.com/news-and-events/news/global-study-reveals-only-one-third-of-large-companies-are-succeeding

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