Changing how teams collaborate has enabled British multinational telecommunications company Vodafone to “be more responsive to what the market and our customer are telling us,” said Milan Jain, principal digital marketing manager, who spoke to eMarketer as part of our upcoming Collaboration for Digital Transformation report.
Jain notes that in the past Vodafone, like most companies, was not organized around the customer journey. “It’s always been inward looking,” Jain said. “We have traditional marketing, sales, operations, branding, awareness, but the customer journey cuts across all of the above, which was a fundamental challenge to our siloed way of working.”
Other research confirms that schisms between different departments obstructs digital transformation efforts. Harvard Business Review polled 799 company executives from various industries worldwide and found that organizational silos were the top barrier to digital transformation. In a similar study of 200 US IT executives by research firm IDG, 59% of respondents said that tech silos were one of the top roadblocks to transformation of their IT infrastructure.
“No matter how much more data you get, the silos still prevent you from fully realizing the value of that data-transformation project,” said Siara Nazir, head of digital marketing at design software company Autodesk.