“Appreciation is the Major Topic”

Norderstedt, February 27, 2018 – Digitalization is becoming noticeable in more and more businesses. It is no longer enough merely to make use of new technologies for enhancing productivity and customer satisfaction. Instead, the digital transformation is causing disruptive change in nearly all walks of business. In particular, it is changing the requirements placed on corporate culture: digital thinking, creativity, flexibility and innovations are elementary requirements when it comes to leadership, process control and competitiveness in the digital world.

“Changes call for leadership, but also for cooperative solidarity. Appreciation is the major topic,” was one of the conclusions drawn by the roundtable “Digital Transformation and Corporate Culture: Change or Die?” at the Hamburger IT-Strategietage. “Networking together with as little hierarchy as possible is more important than creating external structures.”

The roundtable discussion hosted by Lufthansa Industry Solutions was fully booked up, with sixty people attending, and also came to the unanimous conclusion that the digital transformation is not simply a topic for IT, but is also of importance to boards and management. “Decisions must be made that affect the whole business. Otherwise it would not be a transformation of the entire business, but at best only a transformation of IT.”

The discussion revolving around enterprise readiness, leadership, agility and customer needs also quickly broached the pain points of digital transformation in established companies. How else can they master the balancing act between tradition and upheaval? “Change is nothing new to us, even when the adjective ‘digital’ comes before it,” was the confident assessment of the participants. And the approach to a solution is as pragmatic as it is challenging: “We are hybrid.” Agility and radical new approaches if required and demanded by the market, but there are areas where it is absolutely necessary for companies to hold on scrupulously to processes, the D-Check. In these areas, agility must not be achieved at the expense of security or consumer protection.

The focus of all these changes, however, is still the customer. The question is, how companies can make their offer so attractive that customers accept it. And how they can get innovation into their transactions. On this point, host Heiko Packwitz from Lufthansa Industry Solutions said, “Companies can only reach the next level if they get their innovation up to enterprise readiness. The main thing is to properly manage and implement innovations, no matter what technology is being used.”