Ask any Chief Transformation Officer (CTO) how their role has changed in the last five years, and they’ll likely have countless answers. Market disruptions, rapid technological shifts, and evolving customer expectations are just a few.
Today’s CTOs play a key role in driving enterprise-wide change, fostering a culture of innovation, and ensuring that transformation aligns with the organization’s broader business goals. Driving and executing these transformation objectives comes with numerous challenges that can hinder progress.
Below, we’ll examine these challenges in more detail and discuss the steps CTOs can take to define the business objectives that drive their organization. We’ll also discuss how Shibumi, the leading transformation software built to help businesses maximize ROI from their strategic initiatives, can help.
The Top 5 Challenges CTOs Face in Defining Business Objectives
As digital transformation accelerates and the market continues to evolve, CTOs are under increasing pressure to define clear objectives that drive organizational change. Yet, this process is far from straightforward. CTOs must overcome obstacles like cross-departmental alignment, shifting priorities, and organizational resistance — all while ensuring that their transformation objectives are measurable and aligned with the company’s broader strategy. This complexity is just one factor that makes defining objectives a major challenge. The hurdles include:
- Alignment with business strategy: This is arguably the biggest hurdle for CTOs because they must ensure that their transformation initiatives align with broader business objectives, which 59% of organizations say is a struggle. Misalignment can lead to wasted resources and missed opportunities.
- Balancing competing priorities: Internal roadblocks, such as limited resources and competing priorities across departments, make it difficult for CTOs to decide where to focus transformation efforts. Justifying those decisions can also be difficult when multiple areas are vying for attention.
- Setting measurable outcomes: Defining outcomes is only half the battle; CTOs must ensure those goals are measurable, which is especially challenging for qualitative objectives such as improving company culture or boosting collaboration.
- Managing stakeholder expectations: Balancing the expectations of multiple stakeholders, each with their own vision of what transformation should achieve, is an additional challenge CTOs face. This can create friction as differing opinions about priorities, timelines, and success metrics emerge. Clear, written goals that are transparent and viewable by all stakeholders help mitigate these tensions by creating a unified vision.
- Navigating change and resistance: Resistance is a common barrier to transformation. Employees may be hesitant to embrace change, making it harder for CTOs to gain buy-in. When objectives are unclear or not communicated effectively, resistance intensifies. Setting transparent, written goals can help alleviate this by showing how each team contributes to the bigger picture.
Proper Objective Setting: The Foundation of Transformation Success
While the challenges above can hinder CTOs from achieving their transformative goals, there is a way to move beyond these obstacles: setting clear, written objectives that are transparent and viewable by all employees. This transparency fosters accountability throughout the entire organization, ensuring alignment across departments. From an employee standpoint, when individuals can see how their efforts contribute to a larger goal, they’re more likely to buy into the transformation process, reducing resistance and improving collaboration.
In addition to being transparent, CTOs must break down larger goals into smaller, actionable initiatives. Breaking goals into more manageable pieces makes it easier to track progress, adjust priorities, and ensure alignment across departments. Each initiative can then be tied to a specific aspect of the transformation process, ensuring all efforts are driving toward the overall objective. That clarity helps CTOs stay focused, even when navigating competing priorities or limited resources.
Additionally, by “laddering up” smaller initiatives towards these larger goals, CTOs can also improve cross-departmental collaboration and reduce resistance to change.
Achieve More: How Shibumi Transforms Your Business Objectives
Navigating the challenges of setting clear business objectives is not easy, especially without the right tools. That’s where Shibumi comes in.
At Shibumi, we understand that achieving your targets doesn’t happen overnight. We know that reaching business goals is a journey — one that involves using tools that help you easily track progress on all the initiatives needed to help you attain your larger goals over time.
That’s why our tools are designed to give you a clear understanding of performance metrics for informed decision-making and a collaborative environment where you can share insights, track progress, and build consensus on objectives.
While other platforms capture binary goals (e.g., Did you take $10 million in costs out of the enterprise? Yes or no?), Shibumi gives you the tools needed to move beyond goal-setting challenges and set objectives with confidence. Specifically, Shibumi Business Objective planning supports:
- Time-based objectives: Set both short- and long-term goals, and track progress and dependencies over time.
- Relational objectives: Most objectives don’t exist in a vacuum — the outcome of one shorter-term objective (e.g., quarterly revenue) affects longer-term goals (e.g., three-year revenue forecasts). Shibumi makes it easy to connect short- and long-term goals as well as goals across initiatives so you can understand dependencies and how achieving each objective affects your larger plan.
- Non-financial and financial objective: Shibumi lets you set a broad range of objectives, not merely financial objectives. Whether it’s reducing carbon emissions or managing a finite set of engineering resources, Shibumi helps you set all kinds of objectives.
- Best practice KPIs: Shibumi has a library of KPIs from across industries to get you started. You can see benchmarks or use Shibumi AI Recommend to suggest KPIs to quantify the impact of your strategic initiatives.
- Proactive course-correction: Shibumi delivers automated alerts and flags to team members and leaders if their objectives are at risk, so you can pivot before a risk becomes a problem.
- Point in time and comparative snapshotting: With Shibumi Snapshotting, you have the ability to see what’s changed in your plan and where you are making progress toward your objectives—or where you might need to put additional resources to achieve your goals.
Ready to see the difference Shibumi can make in your business? Get in touch with us to learn more.