Digital transformation is a journey by an organization, not a destination. It starts from digitization, digitalization and digital transformation by adopting/integrating technologies to change the way any organization operates, communicates, and engages with customers. It may be a daunting task to achieve, but it has to have a clear strategy and plan to accomplish.
To achieve the end goal, there are few key elements which needs to taken care based on my interactions with digital leaders and market success stories;
Define the goal and vision : It includes understanding of the current state of an organization, business ecosystem, value chain and customers. It has to be pragmatic with existing resources and infrastructure.
Digital strategy buy-in by CxO’s/leadership: Cross functional leadership team or CDO /CXO commitment, business priority and buy-in for the strategic changes are very essential to achieve the vision.
Agile process: Agile focus is to move things and changes quickly by an organization. Not only on the time/pace, it takes to hit the target overall ROI while it also enriches overall quality products and enables more happy customers. Again it’s not just process, this needs a change/agile mindset with defined structure, willingness to experiment, reinvent and execute.
Focus on customer experience: Digital transformation is not to do with internal organization changes through technology adoption, talent and cultural changes. It has a critical KRA to focus on customers. The end goal of transformation is to address and bring seamless customer experience to the organization the way you want to interact and serve their needs to have happy customer experience (CX) through DX (Digital experience).
Technology strategy: Choosing and adopting the right technology for the digital transformation journey is very critical. Wrong selection will end up failing the entire vision. Technologies to enable organizations to collect and analyze data, automate processes, engage customers at scale and pace.
Skills and talent: Over and above, having or choosing right skill competency across the talent pyramid is the very critical success component. The transformation journey must have tech-savvy champions with an open mind set to adopt changes and experimenting things rapidly.
Data driven approach: A holistic and strong data-driven approach helps organizations to make precise decisions across hierarchy. Create and build right IT infrastructures to collect and analyze a variety of data from different sources in large volume at high velocity. This serves leadership and organizations to visualize the progress and also RED flags too!.
Metrics to measure & continuous improvement: Select different KPI’s and metrics in place, throughout the digital transformation journey right from beginning. A well thought through goal has to have defined metrics to measure different stages of progress. It will also help KPI owners to adopt any change management and areas of improvements. Continuous learning, evaluation and feedback mechanisms are the ways to improve better digital transformation strategy and execution. It requires matured cultural mind-set and willingness to experiment
In every down time teach organizations or markets to enable new ways of business model and compel some transformation for either survival or growth. To scale the business growth in the most efficient way, going after digital transformation in an organization becomes inevitable in this era and future of digital business model.
The need for digital technologies can vary business to business from cloud, CRM, martech, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, information security, internet of things/connected devices, 3D printing, mobile applications, intelligence automation and can be any. But the way it has to be executed with the right approach and constructive elements such as right vision, talent, technology, leadership buy-in, customer focus, data and continuous improvement are very important to progress in the digital transformation journey.
