Digital Transformation: Decoding Transition from B2B to H2H Experience

Digital Transformation has become one of the hottest ‘buzz words’ of today’s times. And why not, when we discover even baby products manufacturers and renowned accounting firms are heavily betting on this term. The increasing internet and mobile penetration has led to a digital disruption & none of the industries had remained untouched with this new digital wave. The credit goes to ground breaking technological advancements & government initiatives which had made affordable technology accessible to masses across remotest areas of the planet.

Technology has evolved massively in the past decade while trending towards a new one taking birth everyday with the first rays of sunlight. Many of them appear to be promising to find a crucial place in our life as suggested by these stats.

Industries across all segments are expressing immense confidence in these technologies & are heavily investing in them to achieve desired insights & results. The fact cannot be denied that these technologies are actually making a significant impact on us by making things convenient and life easier.

But, a strange thing to watch in this Digital Transformation wave is the organizations perspective. Most organizations appear to be focused more around the term ‘Digital’ instead of Transformation which stresses on a strong affinity towards technology.  The focus is on making humans tech savvy resulting into a new generation which is technology dependent & data hungry. The term ‘Transformation’ appears to have been left mid-way which has resulted into rise of humanoids lacking human values & common sense. The fear of loss of human jobs to robots and technology overcoming human life are on the horizon.

Did we really mean to create such of world where technology overcomes us & our values?

Digital Transformation isn’t limited to technological advancement, but has a much wider scope of deliver. The transition from Gen X to Y and now Z is heading towards redefining the principles of doing business. In order to adopt & adapt to these principles, it requires an enterprise wide agile transformation. The world is transitioning from an independent individual country setup to a collaborative cultures constituting into a connected planet of 7.5 billion headcount. A person inside an office might be an employee but outside the premises could be a customer or a potential business opportunity.

Here are some insightful thoughts for consideration as building blocks of organization transformation strategy to create a collaborative & sustainable digital transformation ecosystem and transition towards a human2human model.

·        Business agility: It should reside at the heart of any business as agile is a culture in itself. Organizations need to contemplate adopting it at across levels & not consider agile as a methodology limited to a small software development group. Focusing on time to value, low latency, rapid adaptation, innovation, mobility & flexibility are some of its key components.

·        Flat Hierarchy: Moving away from traditional hierarchical organizational models to flat hierarchy of small self-organizing teams. Promoting Intrapreneurship within organization would deliver impressive results & enhance engagement.

·        Bureaucracy: A major roadblock in smooth functioning of any organization and should end with immediate effect. Granting optimum authority & autonomy to individuals at all levels to take wise decisions depending on their responsibilities as they tend to possess maximum ground level visibility of their deliverables than anyone else.

·        Agile leadership: The executive management should be educated & open minded enough to accept the disruptive changes & showcase leadership qualities in taking risks which consequently generates confidence in the teams on ground.

·        KPI’s: Moving away from the traditional KPI’s and  focusing on introduction of a new set of indicators like employee happiness index, customer delight score, business health index etc. to maintain a balance between employee engagement & customer satisfaction.

·        Communication has to be as much open, simple, consistent & transparent to ensure the audience at all levels remains connected & updated with the right information.

·        Unified vision is another factor which requires implementation from day 1. Organization leadership should ensure to remain synchronized in terms of vision, mission & goals across all levels.

·        Collaboration is the key to business success. Organizations must be open enough to collaborate internally & externally at all levels in order to achieve their vision & deliver on customer expectations.

·        Security is a major challenge organizations are struggling in today’s big data world. There is a need of an equal effort both from organizations to ensure right security systems are in place to ensure customer data remains encrypted and from customers to keep themselves aware of various security hacks.

Digital Transformation is about connecting the right DOTS (Digital, Operations, Technology & Strategy) while ensuring people, process & system remains minimal affected by the change. Technologies, tools & automation constitutes to be a critical enabler in easing the overall digital journey, but primarily it emphasizes on connecting & collaborating with the right resources to further enhance the human life experience.

In today’s world of Industry 4.0, Business 4.0 & HR 3.0, organizations should urge for building a transformation ecosystem comprising of a perfect mix of communities (technology, consulting, operations & leadership) flexible enough of adapting to any size or scale with the purpose of accommodating the dynamically changing customer’s expectations. Imagine a world where all the big enterprises collaborate with the SMEs & startup’s globally to create a refined & centralized ecosystem of products & services by working, delivering & celebrating the success all together.

Organizations across the planet are aspiring hard to achieve a successful digital transformation & working tirelessly to lay the finest foundation stones for their journey. This is the right moment for them to assess if they are actually heading in the right direction and avoid this disruption turn into a disaster!

Thoughts are personal, views are welcome!