16 AlixPartners Disruption Index 2023
KEY FINDING #3
A leadership trust gap holds back digital initiatives.
Only a handful of leadership teams say they can always and
strongly rely on their senior technology leaders (CIO, CTO and CDO), with
the most skepticism coming from CFOs and COOs. Even the best
companies experience failure if digital initiatives are not designed and
delivered to achieve specific strategic goals-an alignment that must start
at the top.
Business leaders must be digitally-savvy and digital leaders must be business-savvy. Without that combination, trust
breaks down and performance lags. Without it, companies set the wrong priorities, and technology leaders run off and do
their own thing.
When top-performing companies
stumble in digital, leadership is the
dominant cause-not talent, not market
knowledge, not resources. By far the
#1 reason companies fail to get returns
from their digital investment is the
lack of a comprehensive technology
plan and roadmap that is aligned
to business strategy, cited by 62%
of companies as a major problem.
Lack of clear goals-also a leadership
failure-comes second, at 48%.
But failure has different parents
depending on the nature of the
company. While a lack of strategic
alignment is an issue across the board,
there are striking differences in the
cause of failure for different subsets.
Setting goals and priorities COMPANIES THAT GET LOW ROI
from technology investments seem to stumble on the basics.
They are much more likely to attribute failure to a lack of
management accountability (47%, vs. 27% for high-ROI
companies), failure to consider cybersecurity (38% to 26%), and
a lack of talent (41% to 20%-is it revealing that unsuccessful
executives are so likely to ascribe failure to talent?). They
should improve their blocking and tackling.
COMPANIES THAT GET HIGH ROI
in their industries sometimes rush headlong into digital
projects. Compared to those that follow behind, disruptors are
more likely to fail because their goals are unclear (61% to 43%),
or they haven't done enough piloting and experimenting (54%
to 39%) or they haven't paid enough heed to cybersecurity
(41% to 32%) They can improve their focus.
The test of leadership is its ability to get the big things right so that the company can advance through the
minefields all major initiatives confront. The data show large gaps in this leadership capability.