Digital benefits–did your company just spend millions of dollars on a multiyear digital implmentation and the promised pot of gold seems to be elusive? Kartik Ravel has led and advised on many business and IT transformations across small and large ogranizations, he often was surprised to see the limited progress in benefits realization.

Recently, a noticeable trend has arisen where executives are questioning the value of their digital investments. They have cause for concern as the promises of digital benefits are often not being fully realized. However, not all organizations are failing short; top performing companies are harvesting significant business benefits through a value-led transformation approach.

Next Time

For those who have worked with the Results Chain™ technique found in Macroscope, the most powerful justification for an investment is how it will contribute toward important business outcomes. Here’s how I’d want to use it to approach this question next time. This is a first draft of a model I could use to stimulate deeper understanding and facilitate decisions.

There are some further lines of reasoning, but this gives the main picture.

The Need

I was recently asked to help with a business case for a course. It was a “soft skills” course that would contribute to team building, collaboration, creativity and productivity. The client knew instinctively that the course was important to the development and performance of her people, but she had to convince her boss that they should spend the money now instead of next year.

A client who had been with me in a Results Chain modeling class – recently told me of her challenge getting her internal client to agree on the definition of an outcome. Even though the main focus of everything on the model was toward an increase in a key metric, he refused to define the outcome as “…increased”. He simply wanted to state it as something “to be monitored”. (But he still wanted to see the root initiative take place.)

His fear was apparently – that by stating the outcome as we normally would in a Results Chain – he would be personally committing to that outcome, and he would be held accountable for it! (He was in a public sector organization.)