While the BPI says it is concerned about the lagging digitalization of French SMEs, the questions business leaders are still asking themselves: where do I start? What will be my return on investment? What are the risks of acting... and not acting?

French SMEs and TMEs are reluctant to embark on the path of digital transformation, as the task seems so complicated, unclear, and sometimes sprawling.

Digital transformation can involve rethinking its product and service offering, redesigning its business model, reorganizing its hierarchical structure, optimizing its processes, recruiting or training new skills, transforming its customer journey, or, sometimes, doing all of the above  !

No wonder leaders don't know where to start, and are reluctant to put their company through such an upheaval.

And without a proven return on investment, how do you know how much risk you're putting your structure through ?

What if the risk wasn't the digital transformation itself, but the way it is carried out ?

The pitfall of lacking a systemic vision

The first difficulty for business leaders is lacking a cross-functional and systemic vision in their transformation strategy.

Digital leads to a general upheaval of organizations, not a simple mutation confined to a few sectors like IT or Marketing.

You want to invest in your website to strengthen your natural referencing and increase your sales ?

You will therefore need, beyond the immediate investment of redesigning the site, to consider the resources needed over the long term to feed the site with relevant content and constantly update its functionality.

The systemic vision, to anticipate the impacts of a digital project in his company

Who is going to handle it ? Do you have the resource in-house ? Do you need to get someone up to speed or find a provider ? What is the burden of this ? What budget ?

To bring out a systemic vision specific to your organization, you will need to co-construct the evolutions by gathering people with different skills and positions in the company around a table.

Even if they are not directly concerned by the digital transformation (but for how long ?), they will surely be able to detect potential impacts on their department/missions.

In the example of the site, think of involving in the reflection of course marketing, communication, but also for example sales people (what content to put on the site to attract qualified leads ?), HR, purchasing, production, etc.

The risk of dispersing transformation efforts

As we said earlier, digital transformation is potentially dozens of topics and projects to be addressed within a single company.

One of the risks would be to try to chase several hares at once. Or a random effort always gives a random result.

In the first instance, focus your efforts on one or two strong priorities.

For example, if you feel that your sales team doesn't have the culture to evolve to new practices like Social Selling or the use of e-CRM, you could plan very operational trainings, no longer focused on the " basics " of selling but on the natural experience of digital tools, and their integrations into the current and target sales processes.

If your recruiting teams are struggling to get to grips with new HR sourcing approaches such as Inbound Recruiting, why not call on a specialized agency?

The digital divide: myth or reality?

Some people have been immersed in the digital culture since a very young age (they are called the " digital natives ") when others were only confronted with it late in their career, without necessarily having chosen it.

Digital transformation has a direct impact on employees and many leaders overlook the brake that a predominantly non-digital culture can represent to a transformation project.

Beware of clichés nonetheless : not all younger people are digital champions by default while the " old " would all necessarily struggle.

The digital divide is not just generational

Digital in business means nothing as such  it is a new paradigm to consider for understanding business processes.

This means that an experienced professional can very well appropriate quickly digital tools and culture because they are immediately perceived as valuable aids to their know-how while inexperienced employees will not be able to make the association between digital and real work !

Recruitment: the main channel for spreading digital transformation

Acculturation involves employee support and training, but also recruiting new profiles, often atypical, who spearhead the company's digital culture.

For example, BPCE Group has chosen to implement 360° digital acculturation plans and has dedicated an entire site to them, where employees, partners and customers share their experience.

In collaboration with the pro-digital profiles already in the company, they create a natural emulation that gradually spreads a digital culture favoring the transformation project - all this of course as part of a more global communication and acculturation plan.

Recruiting these profiles is difficult. Everyone wants them, the talent pool is small, prices are rising and often out of reach for many companies.

In this context, it is therefore relevant to consider using companies that are experts in sourcing this talent, that know how to anticipate market, job changes, and that also understand how to attract them to your company - spoiler : it's not always the money !