Digital Transformation: 3 Key Considerations

Bringing Digital Disruption or Digital Transformation is more of a necessity than a choice in today’s competitive world. In many organizations’ decision cycles lag technology cycles and VUCA is pushing organizations to do more with less. Digital innovation is shaking the core of every industry and incumbents are struggling to respond as digital revolutions are giving power in hands of the business users. Organizations are encouraging creative behaviors and becoming ready to disrupt their internal processes in order to do so. Digital Disruption will be bringing better and common ways of working, ultimately destroying silos and bringing in better decisioning. It is important to set-up the digital foundation for transformation from Day1 which includes setting up digital transformation vision, goals and stakeholder buy-in, transforming culture, building a strong data foundation for 720 engagement, AI-enabled business process models, being data AI ready, data democratization and much more. The main challenges organizations need to overcome are slow decision cycles, cultural issues, complacency about existing business processes/models and fear of disruption to existing business models.

For today’s write up, I am limiting on 3 key considerations of the top approaches for successful digital transformation...

1.   Enterprise-wide Business Alignment and Educate On Digitalization Goal.

Build your Customer-Centric Digital Business Strategy planning from the onset. The transformation will be hard without educating the business and end-users on the goals of transformation, It is critical to educate them why we are transforming, what we are transforming to avoid day-to-day resistance from business users. Business users also need to get a sense of ownership in positive long term business impacts of transformation.

Since alignment at the strategic level to tactical to operational level is critical for successful transformation, business users should be completely sold on the benefits of adaption. Hence organizational change management (also called as management of change) plays an important role in user expectation management, smoothening user onboarding and widescale adoption

Fear of failure, afraid to return to legacy, culture issues, moving out of comfort zone adds to more resistance to transformation are key roadblocks. When disruption strikes, companies find it difficult to keep pace with the fastmoving and changing world as they cling on to the old ways and models of working. Getting alignment of business users across domains, considering their functional design considerations, involving users in managing acceptance, identifying business ambassadors for transformation programs is critical. Key business users must be involved through the journey from ideation, design, validation and production adoption and show them the path of productivity gain are critical aspects. 

It is important to craft organizational training strategy and user onboarding strategy for better and predictable results. Business Ambassadors play an important role in user training, user adoption, communicating success stories, building knowledge dissemination mechanisms to make transformation an exciting journey. It is also important to acquire digital talent to bring fresh thinking.

2.   Building Data Foundation for Successful Digital Transformation

• Data first is becoming an essential and critical paradigm enabling digital business transformation and must be matched by the speed of business innovation. Data is driving organizational agility and change everywhere. Data-driven AI will be a vast source of competitive strength. To enable effective, automated and intelligent data management requires focused attention to all areas of the data lifecycle such as Data Ingestion, Data Profiling, Data Trust including data governance with an aim at coping with the explosion of data. The first step on any transformation journey is knowing your data estate, roadmap, tools, landscape and understanding the data need. As data drives all digital transformation priorities, it is important to identify what data you bring in, how data will manifest in the analytical zone, how much of history data you bring in, certifying the quality of data from the source of ingestion.
• Manage Golden data: Identify business-critical data and business processes.
• Intelligent Data Catalog for 720  engagement (inside and outside holistic view of data): Discover and manage Inventory of all data (common data dimensions/master, Sources, data mapping, Profiling)
• Enabling cross-functional collaboration around data domains.
• Accelerate time from data ingestion to insights for faster decisions.
• Foundation design on common data foundation, governing data, building golden data model.
• Modernized infrastructure and Architecture on Bigdata and cloud platforms.
• Standardizing, harmonizing, and labeling business data (business naming conventions), metadata capture, lineage
• Deliver trusted governed data and comply with data-centric regulations.

3.   Choose the right set of tools and enablers.

The choice of tools becomes very critical in crafting and modernizing the digital transformation journey. Game changers in today’s digital transformation are Big data, the right choice of cloud infrastructure, acceleration of business values through with AI with ML and Deep learning capabilities with the right analytical tools.

These tools enable businesses to make decisions faster, better GTM insights and strategy, data democratization, provide better services to the customer via various tools like AI-enabled Chatbots integrating to the organization’s service ticketing systems, AIOps, On top of this building robust security and complete data protection implementation is critical to the modernization of digital systems. Tools and accelerators need to be coupled with enterprise-wide Cybersecurity transformation.

APIs / Microservices/ SOA/Service Mesh based architectures deliver and scales up to the demands and provide utmost agility to the modern digital strategy.

Also bringing in the right set of cultures like DevOps, DataOps, MLOps, Self-Service driven reporting, deep analytics, the business managed data enablement provides greater flexibility for digital transformation.

Thanks to Yash Sowale for his first review and valuable inputs..

Few more key considerations to come in the next part of the write-up.