Critical Success Factors for Sustainable Digital Transformation in Kenya Commercial Banks

Abstract

This project sought to identify the critical success factors of digital transformation in Kenyan Banks and how to sustain the transformation momentum by keeping those factors in focus. Many banks in the recent past have realized that they may have reached a hiatus in their earnings momentum and have thus embarked on ambitious transformation projects that are meant to turn their fortunes around. While this has worked for some, others in the same ventures are still languishing behind. As the study identified these critical success factors, the researcher considered banks that had a tight noose on their transformation programs and those who were struggling behind. The study also sought to address gaps noted in previous studies where it demonstrated that despite there being a significant number of studies conducted on the use of ICT to transform businesses and enhance transformation programs, there is a lack of research focused on sustaining digital transformation initiatives in the long term. This knowledge gap demonstrates that it is unclear what factors are needed to ensure the success of a digital transformation program beyond the initial short-term gains. The author studied literal works in the recent past that contributed to the problems set out in this study and provided a base for it. These studies and industry reports focused on organizational transformation in various economic sectors covering failures of digital transformation initiatives, successful cases and possible recommendations. The study was a descriptive study that employed survey and case studies on the top three Kenyan banks heavily invested in digital transformation. The author formulated questionnaires that guided transformation champions, who formed the population of the study, on giving their experience in the programs. It was established from the study that all the factors examined in the research had a significant and positive relationship with Sustainable Digital Transformation with the significant value from the correlation analysis being positive and less than 0.05. Identified factors included skills, business dimension, transparency, respect, training and mentorship, resources, analytics dimensions, digital dimension, acknowledgement, process re-engineering, change management, and customer dimension. This supported the argument that digital transformation is directly linked to an organization’s survivability and profitability, but that there is a lack of understanding of the critical success factors of digital transformation.