DIGITAL STRATEGY: Mindful Digitization

Perhaps many of us still remember the story of the first Ebola patient on the US soil in fall of 2014. The patient eventually died after having sent back home with antibiotics from his first visit to the emergency room with high fever and abdominal pain at a Texas hospital. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) had insisted that all patients should be asked about recent travel history outside the country, which the nurse promptly asked and entered into the EMR system about the patient's recent travel from Liberia. Later, the CDC admitted that the people who were making the medical decision, weren't communicated properly and they dropped the ball. The director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said on CNN that "hopefully this will never happen again".

How can we ensure that the director's hope becomes an assured reality? That is where we need to realize the limits of human mind and how we can augment it with digital systems for better guaranteed outcomes. The medical professionals will forget and miss out on things again in the future. But, it is up to us to make the EMR system smarter with intelligent algorithms that can allow configuration of business processes to connect parameters such as travel history and medical symptoms to alert and prompt medical practitioners to proactively take actions.

This is just one example of how a digital environment can make humans perform more efficiently and effectively.

The concept of Digital is about operating and managing an organization around data, both internal transactional data and external public data, and intelligent learning algorithms, utilizing technology and techniques to extract superior and optimum value from its resources.

Strategy is a plan or conceptual set of ideas put together to reach a certain goal or purpose, based on the information currently available to the decision makers.

And, Digital Strategy is a set of conceptual plans and ideas to optimally organize and manage processes, resources and people based on transactional and external data, processed and evaluated by intelligent and learning computer algorithms, both to support and supplant the decision makers, as appropriate. There are certain set of processes that could be completely automated, using artificial intelligence (AI) principles, where as many others may be finalized by the decision makers with the aid of smart decision support systems, using intelligence augmentation (IA) techniques. The operational focus should change to more evidence-based than intuitional, or a proper mix of the two. The primary goal is to overcome the limits of human minds, in quickly and consistently processing large amounts of data at a time, and avoid guesswork and gambling based on instincts and emotions. In this age of big data, it is not the data that we are short of, it is the inability to intelligently utilize them.

As we move towards an extremely personalized and fine-targeted engagement with both potential and existing customer base, enterprises with a sound digital strategy is going to outperform others, unless the organization and its operations are very tiny. Every customer engagement should reinforce the intimacy and detail, as if the customer was dealing with one single person on the other end. Different members of the organization should talk and interact in one single voice with clear knowledge on all the prior interactions that the customer had had. This is possible only with a smart digital system that drives and organizes the data and process flow.

Digital Strategies equip you to be more proactive than reactive. The digital environment should facilitate to quickly identify the customer, his/her needs, current status, any ongoing issues, and put together a smart digital dashboard to the team member to intimately engage with the customer to effectively navigate him/her through the next steps in the engagement. Such a digital system should be able to create the excitement quickly and lead the customer to close the deal. The system should continue to reach out to the customer through automated message systems to keep him/her engaged and warm.

A superior digital strategy will also mix up the automated steps with personal calls and human touch-points, as appropriate and when necessary. The biggest caution in digital strategy is the overreliance on exclusive and excessive automation, which leads to 'mindlessness'. Lack of empathy and soft messaging will result in rapid erosion of customer trust and loyalty. Most customers want to feel warm and fuzzy about their engagement with the organization. They should get a feeling that they are in safe and competent hands. They should feel certain level of intimacy. We need the human touch and mindfulness projected all through the customer journey and experience.

So, where do you start? Build your digital competency, develop deep understanding of concepts beyond the hype, have thinkers and innovators in your team, engage with academia for potential new spark, build cross functional teams, encourage integrative thinking across domains and expertise, assemble a team that can develop smart algorithms, and enforce mindfulness within the entire stakeholder community, especially among the associates and with the customer.

An organization with an ideal mix of digital and personal intimacy, we can say, will be a true Digital Operation (which I call DigiOps).

Dijo Alexander is a digitization and cognitive analytics enthusiast. He is a Practitioner Scholar Fellow of Design and Innovation at Weatherhead School of Management in Case Western Reserve University, where he researches big data and digitization strategies for organizations.