This post articulates the need for and benefits of changing the organisational culture with the view to successfully implement a digital transformation project.

According to Forbes more than 76% of digital transformation (DT) projects fail to achieve their desired benefits for the organisation. The reasons mostly quoted for so many failings include: lack of leadership, treating technology as a panacea, absence of defined goals from the outset, not having a clear idea of internal capabilities, not understanding the people aspect of the organisation, and misalignment between business and technology parts of the organisation. Regardless of the above outlined difficulties in successfully implementing DT projects, specifically with sustainability in mind, DT is a necessity for all organisations across industries and sectors to remain competitive and relevant to their customers while harnessing technology and change to capitalise on internal efficiencies. So how can organisations improve the implementation of their DT projects ensuring the desired benefits are achieved, and the specific organisational changes (impacts) are introduced? Reflecting on successfully implemented DT projects in several organisations, we have found that following the implementation phases, broadly described below, significantly improves the likelihood of success: Phase I - Designing and Focusing Investment To successfully implement a digital transformation project organisations need to firstly gain a good understanding of the " As-Is " - where they are today, challenges they face, and opportunities they can harness through digitalisation, either internally or externally to grow and develop a sustainable future. During Phase I organisations need to answer questions such as, How can digitalisation strengths be utilised better? How can digitalisation weaknesses be turned into strengths? How can opportunities be seized through effective digitalisation? How can threats and disruption be avoided? We have found that a good starting point for any organisation to gain a good understanding of their internal capabilities and assess their digital maturity is to use tools such as the one described in the below link http://digital.sa.gov.au/resources/topic/digital-government/digital-transformation-toolkit . Such a tool, among many others, enables any organisation to explore current capabilities across five pillars, namely Governance and Leadership , People and Culture , Capacity and Capability , Innovation and Technology , and assess their level of competence across five levels of maturity from minimal to transformed. A SWOT analysis for digitalisation further allows an organisation to reflect on their internal challenges and strengths (e.g. improving internal company performance) and external opportunities and threats (e.g. external capabilities when dealing with customers and partners) and coupled with the digital maturity assessment findings to define the objective(s) for their DT project and the specific outputs and outcomes expected.

This article describes the latest trends in internationalisation in Higher Education, challenges and opportunities with a particular emphasis in Oman.

This article outlines the criteria for evaluating and selecting ERP vendors that universities and HEIs should consider using to maximise ROI for their organisation.

Recent surveys indicate that more than 50% of Project Management Offices (PMOs) [1] have been in existence for less than two years. This article comments on how to bring innovation into the PMO so that it remains relevant to the needs of the organisation.

It seems that most articles, presentations and websites represent innovation using lightbulb images putting the focus and emphasis of the whole innovation process, it seems, entirely on the eureka moment - the lightbulb moment. However is this the most significant step in the innovation process? This article outlines the drawbacks of associating innovation only with creativity and proposes the use of innovation management frameworks for organisations to be more successful in their innovation pursuits.

Although benefit attribution of a project is very important to any organisation, it is considered very hard to implement and therefore organisations do not put any concerted efforts behind it. This article recommends the development of a ‘line of sight’ between the intended benefits, the changes to the organisational blueprint and the project deliverables in order to ensure that the "right" projects are implemented.

This article builds the case around the advantages and disadvantages of building an ERP solution versus purchasing one from a well established vendor.

This article discusses the efficient frontier analysis as a means of optimising innovation project selection, developing balanced innovation portfolios.