Digital for Zombies!
Well, I call myself Zombie when it comes to Digital ! Completely overwhelmed, amazed, appalled and intrigued by the scale of Digital words getting used all across. It has become part and parcel of our daily conversation – and it keeps getting deeper and interesting.
I am trying to explain Digital in simple words so that we can get the common understanding – it’s for Zombies, not Dummies :)
What is Digital?
Digital is a maturity journey of an enterprise, which is enabling, automating and easing the way it intends to do transactions with consumers, partners or providing services to employees. Simple as that -few important words to note – enable, automate and ease. If someone told you that Digital is about Technology, ask them to memorize these words. Digital is all about:
· Enable – Customers and Employees (all about experience)
· Automate - Processes
· Ease - Technology
What is Digital Maturity?
Digital Maturity is a reference scale for the adoption within the enterprise. Again, remember the word – adoption. There is no fixed global scale where every organization has to map it’s maturity – it’s a reference journey in the context of business you are in. Example, in Banking- Maturity Level 3 might be Self Service banking, but Self Service Insurance can be Level 4 of maturity. It is the adoption rate at which enterprise brings the digital journey internally and externally. There is nothing wrong if the internal assessment puts the maturity scale at 2 – provided, there is a clear roadmap and plan to achieve to next level of adoption.
What is Technology in Digital?
There are many buzzwords flying around currently when defining Digital. Every provider has its own definition of Digital and every Enterprise has it’s own view of consuming. There is no bible which states that if you need to do these 5-10 things and you will be called “Digital Enterprise”. These are relative suggestions, which will help you to enable into the Digital frontier.
There are roughly 10 technology building blocks in Digital. It is improbable that as an organization, it can implement all 10, but if the adoption has been into 4 or 5, it can safely assume to be a Digital company.
1. Social – social enablement, social connect, social interaction, social marketing
2. Experience – UX, CRM, portal, app
3. Communication – collaboration tools like Skype, Office 365, Sharepoint, Slack, others
4. Marketing – contextual, personalized, commerce – Adobe, Sitecore, others
5. Productivity – Robotic Process Automation or similar process automation approach
6. Chatbots – Self service capabilities
7. AI – Next generation cognitive services
8. Analytics – insights, predictive and prescriptive – Power BI, Tableau, Qlik
9. Blockchain – distributed ledger
10. Cloud – public, private, hybrid – Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google
It seems scary to incorporate everything in the overall value eco-system, but the mantra is keep it as part of journey! There is no magic wand which can take from scale 0 to 10, but there are systematic approaches, techniques and tools to take you there.
How to implement Digital?
There is no fixed answer to this – it’s quite relative within the organization in terms of seriousness and appetite. As I mentioned above, it is not a technology implementation program – it’s a transformation journey which every connected people (internal or external) to the organization must go through. Top-Down, Bottoms-Up, Cross-Functional – it needs to be adopted at Unit Level.
Various proven techniques which can help:
· Organization Change Management
· Digital Awareness Workshops
· Implementation in Agile or Hybrid Agile way
· Partnership with rising Startups in respective domain
· Independent Digital Team – lean, active and different thinking
Biggest mistake will be to bring Digital into the mainstream BAU project and let the existing teams manage the digital transformation.
Well, this is my personal viewpoint on Digital! Any feedback is always welcome.