Digitisation is not digitalisation: the three stages of digital leadership

In Wilson Obeneme's experience, ask an oil and gas company whether it is digitalising and the answer is yes; ask how much paper still moves through the system, and the honest answer is usually a great deal. Obeneme, an IT and business consultant who once supervised operations at a gas plant, put that second question to a GEPA leadership workshop.

Operational excellence starts with leadership

Obeneme begins with the asset. He puts an energy asset's typical life at about 25 years at first, and says it can stretch to 50 years or beyond depending on how safe and reliable it is kept. Wear is natural, and replacing a critical asset costs far more than maintaining it, which is why the poor maintenance culture so often named across Nigeria and Africa is a financial problem.

He defines operational excellence as the disciplined execution of safe, reliable and efficient operations, delivered through several kinds of leadership: safety, reliability and asset, cost and value, performance, and people and culture. Digital leadership, in his account, is not another item on that list. It runs across all of them.

Three stages, often collapsed into one word

Obeneme is careful to say digital leadership rather than digitalisation leadership, because digitalisation is only one part of the picture. He defines digital leadership as a well-defined plan and method for embedding digital solutions in a business to maximise operations, performance and profit. It has three stages.

• Digitisation converts physical and manual processes, and analogue records, into digital form. It is the foundation: without captured data there is nothing to build on.
• Digitalisation uses digital technology to alter and optimise the processes a business already runs. A paper approval carried from a manager to a colleague, a contractor and a client becomes one connected workflow.
• Digital transformation rethinks how the organisation runs, including its culture, way of working, business model and service delivery. His example is a maintenance schedule that tracks hours, rest and leave automatically instead of being built by hand.

The distinction matters because a scanned document sitting inside an unchanged process is still only digitisation. Obeneme argues that all three stages must be present before an organisation can claim digital leadership, and that the energy sector mostly shows fragments of the first two. One reason the sector moves gradually, he notes, is that it is cost-intensive and a failure can cost a life, but that caution sometimes keeps it from evolving as fast as it should. He asked participants to estimate where their organisation sits on each.

Why digital work stalls

His team's consulting work turned up a number of challenges, and among the biggest were complexity, cost and disruption. Some tools are so complex that staff need a paid five-day course before they can use them, which makes a working paper system look sensible. Others are so expensive that even a company the size of Shell, he says, bought only a few licences and had two or three people share an account.

The third barrier is disruption. Field staff with twenty-five or thirty years in a working routine can experience a new system as something that complicates a job they already know. Obeneme's answer is change management: educating and guiding people until they are comfortable, so the change is agreed rather than imposed.

When that work is skipped, familiar objections follow: the current system works fine, people will not adopt it, it has been tried before. Obeneme reads each as a sign that digital leadership is missing.

Build for the person using it

Obeneme contrasts much of the sector's software, which assumes every user is fluent in spreadsheets, with consumer platforms designed for the least technical user. His team's health software reached almost a hundred hospitals and pharmacies, he says, because someone on the team who studied petroleum engineering first spent months working with hospitals to learn their processes. He then uses his team's operations platform to show all three stages in one system: reports captured on a phone, approvals signed inside the platform, and a manager asking an AI assistant to summarise every team's reports from the last twenty-four hours.

The full course is in the catalogue.