Four Types of Digital Transformation – Which Path Will You Follow? Part II

In the last installment of our Mine Digitization and Automation series, we were talking about the four types of digital transformation. We covered Process Transformation, and Domain Transformation. This week, we’ll continue with the remaining two, Business Model, and Cultural/Organizational Transformation, as we discuss what type of digital transformation might be the highest priority for your company or mine site. Let’s get right back into it!

3. Business Model Transformation

This type of digital transformation is unlikely to be taken at the mine site level – when we talk of business model transformation, it implies much greater complexity and a significant change in market or business strategy. Typically this would represent an enterprise-wide initiative launched as a project of significant size, maybe even as a joint venture, requiring significant investment and senior leadership involvement and accountability at the highest levels, conducted concurrently but separately from ongoing, “normal” operations.

There may be some overlap between process and business model if we are talking about autonomous machinery, or a switch to having a mix of traditional diesel engine and battery electric vehicles (BEVs), for example. But if we are talking about, say, a total switch to BEVs, or fully autonomous mining at depth, this represents a fundamental change in the business.

4. Cultural/Organizational Transformation

This section is not about implementing an actual digital product to bring about cultural change – to our knowledge, no such product exists. Rather, this section is about the people side of change, and while it is easy enough to get technology to do what you want it to do, changing mindsets and convincing people to develop new talents or skills is an entire subset of digital transformation requiring specific approaches to be successful.

Because of this knowledge, once the decision has been taken to undergo a digital transformation, companies will often seek to transform their culture immediately, with the idea that having their people pulling for digital change is the best way to ensure their transformation initiatives succeed.

Make no mistake – it helps, and having frontline operations crews welcome and pull for change, and be familiar with the process of implementation of new tech with all that entails (from testing and learning to adapting and evolving with the changes), is the surest path to making the change stick, and having success implementing others. Many mining companies have entire innovation departments, and you’ve almost certainly heard the desire to create a “Culture of Innovation”, so some version of it.

However, as important as it is to understand your organizational readiness for change, and to ensure a process of change management is led by a skilled and experienced change management expert, these efforts are usually best coupled with concrete initiatives, rather than abstract ideas. (Your change management professional should provide you with a timeline ahead of any initiative.) Bottom line is that people who are being asked to change usually need to experience the change in a tangible way in order to see its benefits, and not be threatened by it. (The latter of which is almost guaranteed, but we will be discussing this in detail in future installments of this series.)

While these four types of digital transformation are in no way a step-by-step process you need to follow, your Process Transformation efforts are likely to precede the other types, prepare your people for the other, more transformational changes, and help develop the cultural and organizational change readiness and desire required to make them stick successfully.

As you’ve no doubt ascertained at this point, digital transformation won’t be easy, but the rewards and returns of even incremental improvements can be significant if they’re done right.

We hope you’ll keep reading.?