Whether I’m reading studies or job offers or listening to a conversation on the subject, there’s something that really irritates me: when we talk about digital, we immediately veer off into marketing and customer relations, as if we’ve forgotten that employees are also users and that an organization’s digital performance begins internally.
Yes, branding and customer experience are essential, but the best external promise won’t hold up if the internal workings are dysfunctional. Digitalization is not just about optimizing a landing page or tracking click-through rates. It’s also what makes or breaks the effectiveness of teams, the quality of service delivered, and the resilience of the business.
When people say to me, “You’re in digital, so you do marketing,” it ends up giving me murderous urges.
In short :
- Digital transformation is too often reduced to marketing, overlooking internal needs.
- However, the majority of digital investments are in internal operations, which are often overlooked.
- Digital performance also depends on effective internal tools, processes, and decisions.
- Internal improvements have a direct impact on customer experience and the quality of products and services.
- Limiting digital to customer-facing areas prevents organizations from realizing its true value.
An overly simplistic view of digital
Whether out of convenience or cultural heritage, we have too often associated digital with marketing. As a result, when a business hires a “Head of Digital Performance,” it is usually to track acquisition KPIs, manage campaigns, or optimize customer journeys. Nothing about internal tools, operational processes, or everyday irritants.
And yet, the figures tell us something quite different.
According to IDC, global spending on digital transformation will reach $3.9 trillion by 2027, with the majority of investment going towards operations, supply chain, production, and back office ([FR]Global spending on digital transformation is expected to grow by more than 16% per year) and which generally fall outside the scope of what we call digital transformation because those who drive it have no interest in these topics, which are not even within their scope.
Peter Drucker told us that “the purpose of a business is to create and keep customers.” If marketing creates customers, everything else is what serves and retains them.
Digital also means back office, processes, and people
Digital transformation is not just about a website or a conversion funnel. It is also embodied in collaborative tools, everyday decision-making, all the information flows that drive production—in short, in the real life of teams.
Digital transformation is therefore also a logistics manager who digitizes supply chain traceability to reduce stock shortages, a CFO who implements a shared budget management tool to make forecasts more reliable, an HR team that deploys a portal to streamline internal mobility management, and a compliance manager who automates document validation processes.
Maybe nobody cares, maybe it’s less flashy, but that’s what makes a business work.
None of these initiatives will make the headlines or win innovation awards, which is a shame. Yet they improve the employee experience, reduce friction, and increase efficiency and productivity.
And they also have an impact on the customer.
Digital performance cannot stop at the end customer
The customer experience and the quality of your products and services are all a direct result of what happens internally. Premium customer service cannot exist without a smooth-running back office. On-time delivery depends on a connected supply chain. A promise of personalization requires well-structured data. Good decisions require data and the right tools. A high-quality, high-performing workforce requires appropriate HR management.
I could go on and on, the list is so long.
But too often, resources are focused on what is visible, while the real value lies behind the scenes. Employees work with outdated tools, repeat data entry, navigate between 12 business apps, and everyone thinks this is normal.
We cannot talk about digital performance if we ignore these blind spots.
Digital performance also means internal efficiency
Rather than focusing all your energy on the shop window, you should reintroduce cross-functionality into your digital thinking, because digital performance also means identifying internal irritants that slow down day-to-day work, streamlining and converging existing tools, automating tasks with no added value, mapping flows and processes to simplify them, and so on.
These are all levers that too many businesses either don’t dare to activate due to a lack of operational culture, or because digital transformation is still driven as an extension of marketing.
Bottom line
Digital is not a profession, a channel, or a support function, but rather an invisible infrastructure, a lever for transformation, and some would even say a common language. As long as we continue to reduce it to a customer-facing role, we will miss its true value.
The day when “Head of Digital” job descriptions also include reducing internal irritants, ensuring tool consistency, and improving the employee experience, we may be able to start talking about performance in earnest.
Related articles:
How does digital transformation look like #2 : the invisible part
What makes a company a digital champion ?
Are CMO and CHRO the winning duet of the digital transformation ?
Ludovic Guilcher (Orange) : HR at the heart of digital transformation through the employee
Letter from a wannabe digital employee to his CEO
Being digital in 2018 : stop thinking that digital is all about the customer
