Digital Transformation in 2019
In a customer meeting a query came up to what really is Digital transformation. And the classic answer provided was “Digital transformation” – represents a cultural shift by businesses to using technology which is Digital to solve their problems.
The follow up question was So what does that really mean? Does moving to the cloud mean Digital transformation? Or adding analytics to an existing process? Or is it moving from paper based processes to an automated process?
There is no simple answer to that. Every organization is unique and even though they fall into the same category say manufacturing cars. All businesses are trying to differentiate to acquire customers by addressing their problems, stay ahead of the competition and grow. While some parts of the business can be addressed through a cookie cutter approach, to achieve the differentiation it requires all the parts of the organization to come together. These are People, Processes, Preparedness and Technology.
The first steps would be to identify the area which a business would like to address. It could be addressing profitability, customer satisfaction, new product development, innovation, employee productivity or retention, inventory reduction etc. Then delving deeper into the area to discover the root cause of the problem/solution need area.
This finance segment customer is essentially trying to differentiate their offerings with a plethora of financial platforms and robo advisory being available at a much lower cost. While they had already done the market segmentation, customer and product identification etc. they were looking for tools to solve their problem. The next few weeks was spent on understanding the requirement in depth, skills their teams had to work with any of the tools and the learning they would have to undergo to change over. This was the hard step and took quite some time as there are multiple people involved and information is not easily available or accessible. Buy in from all the stakeholders was another challenge and each group head had a different way of looking at it.
The top management was presented with the data gathered and the solutions to be adopted. Comparison of the costs to get there and the benefits they would draw out of it was shown. The gross margins which they could achieve, the roadmap to be followed, the agility required of moving towards it and the cost of business as usual was also a part of this.
The five focus areas for 2019 are to utilize blended social channels, adoption of microservices, big data collection and storage, analytics, using a secure and highly available Cloud.
This allows them reach out, seek feedback and improve the products. Also achieving reduction in the data presented to the customer and allowing the customers to choose from basic to full service advisory.
The digital transformation motto for this company is to “Make advisory so simple that anyone can easily use it”. Reminds me of the “Keep it Simple and Stupid” principle.
The pilot is currently on the Public Cloud and each day is a discovery of services available and making use of these. Thanks to the public cloud platform, the customer is able to test out the scenarios and have already finished testing of some use cases. Next steps are regulatory and security testing. These are only the first steps towards the journey. Revisiting and learning will be a constant.
Appreciate your comments.