How to digitize your business

Automation and digitization of business can be a nightmare, some of the ?common problem are long delays, customer issues, productivity impact

many times ?after investing so much of time and money ?we are left with no other option than abandon the? project and go back to the old way of working

?Based on my learning sharing some best practices that you could evaluate to implement in your digitization journey which could save you substantial time, money and effort .

When doing any digitization from my experience there are 3 stages and? the success of the each stage is depended on the proper execution of the earlier stage

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Stage 1: Pre- Digitization ?

Identify a cross functional team : ?

There was a research on speed of execution, when task had been given to individuals which did not require a dependency on anyone else to perform the time taken for the same task ranged from 1 day to 5 days,

however when tasks that required dependency on others and had to be performed as a team, the time taken by the best team was 10 weeks and the slowest team was 2000 weeks

?Though we can get great performance from teams which individually cannot be achieved at the same time, if not managed well the inefficiency of the team can get magnified and drive down the performance of whole team.

To avoid delays care to taken when appointing the team for the digitization project, it should be ideally be between 4-8 members as larger team the communication breaks down with a cross functional representation .

ideally it would be helpful if all of them are seated together and pulled out of their existing profile till the project is completed .

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Eliminate before you automate :

Always refine the rules and processes before adding people. ?Using people to leverage a refined processes multiples production; using people as a solution to poor process multiples problem

Unless something is well defined and important you should not automate, most of the time the mistake we try and make is to automate a process that is already so complex and not well defined .

When we say anything is complex it just means we don’t understand the same, it makes sense to invest time to understand and remove any complexity in the process by making it clear and simple

So as a first step get the process refined, eliminate task that are not needed, really debate if the activities preformed do they add any value what will be impacted if they are eliminated

most processes are grown organically hence never optimized. This step will give clarity to the whole digitization effort and make it easy to implement

?For example when we had been developing a new billing system instead of re-building all the products billing in the new system, we evaluated how many of the existing products we still require, by eliminating products that do not add much value and migrating the customers to better valued products the scope of development of the new billing solution came down dramatically.

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Focus on what is valuable to your client ?

?IF you observe anything app or website you use only 20% of the features, most of the automation or digitization done which is not used is a waste of resources

so it makes sense to invest time to really identify what are those main processes or function that need to be automated that really add value to your stakeholder

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How to identify ?what is valuable to clients? ?the best way to do is ask customers

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have focus group to get feedback from you customer to identify what is valuable to them to arrive at the top 20% of the features that you need to focus on priority .

List all the features and ask to prioritize based on how valuable your customers finds these features. Once you have the priority, then pickup those items which are valuable and easy to do first, this will give immediate traction to the project as stakeholders will start seeing value immediately

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For example : When we were developing our mobile app we had done focus groups with the target customer segment and showed them all the features we had been planning to develop and then we asked them to rank the level of importance of the features we had planned to develop ..

then we pickup those features that was highest ranked and focused for execution on those items with rigor of executing those perfectly on priority .

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Preparation of the requirement document:

?This is the most important step as it is the key to getting it done right the first time. This? document will be the reference point of all the research done which will be used by the project team especially the technology team who is will providing the digital solution .

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Some of the important areas to be covered as part of the documentation is as follows

• Prepare the design guidelines : the more clear the guidelines lesser will be the rework .it is necessary to capture all the elements you would want the technology team to follow for example font size, type of font used, the ticker on dashboard, some elements have a fixed placement and other elements have dynamic order based on usage, activity logging for on boarding modules to enable “resume” function ,all pages to have Google and VMO tags etc ?Also have a Multi channel service approach : mobile, web, physical, Kiosk , direct integration / connected banking
• Build validation in the system that reduce re-work, make use of all public API to validate and even extract the data from authentic sources . With the Government ?push on digital India there is so much access? to much data which we can validate at the time of capturing in our system with authentic database.
• Upfront documentation : Focus on completely digital journey especially when the customer wants to avail another product or service, if there would be a requirement for some documentation for each product, change the process to get all documentation upfront that makes it easy to provide additional products or services we no additional documentations, this is key for cross sell.
• Landing page optimization : Not all pages are of equal importance spend most time in carefully designing the Landing page and sign in page this is most important screen to get right . Customer research plays a vital role in how these pages are designed keeping in mind the requirement of the customer
• Prototype: Prepare a excel/prototype copy of the screens how they will look you can now decide the integration and API that will be required, prepare the use case as a story as it gets easy for the developer and the team to understand
• ·Gap analysis : Estimate the system requirements like nos of modules, API and all the interdependent systems
• Assign responsibility: There could be multiple stakeholders and multiple teams involved – break the tasks into smaller and logical areas for development assign a key person responsible of each task
• Integration with other Platforms : As much as possible try and build the journey taking into account the customers could come from different websites and partner platform, integration can be planned to avoid taking duplicate information but get information passed on from the partners as much as possible so that additional information sought is kept to the minimum … this will ensure good user experience and less drop off

Stage 2: Digitization / Automation

Prioritize first high value low effort items:

Pick each module and Start development in sprints ie breakup the project into logical part developments that get deployed over a short period of time . Build a sprint model of development, development with short duration & testing what is working and then building on that rather than doing a full blow development ..

Micro testing : ?Test and enable in live see feedback and take necessary correction immediately .. multiple mini launch

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Focus on improving the velocity of development :

Track the speed of development what are the road blocks faced or stoppers faced like not getting the right people in the room for decisions, people not collaborating etc .

Get key stakeholders involved to remove bottlenecks and improve the velocity of development . Focus on celebrating small wins, it leads to happiness and happiness leads to improved performance

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Content creation:

We start to create user videos for training on usage of the system so it will help in launch for user adoption, we also create relevant content to enable users to understand the benefits of the system so that the system is optimally used . Demo version of the system created to users to get immediate experience

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Rollout and Automation: Mega launch

Identify critical stakeholders who can champion the change management and who would benefit from the digitization effort

Invite such stakeholders ?for a soft launch and demo to shown of the new system and demonstrate the benefits ..any ?feedback received kindly ?consider to incorporate the same

Taking into account the feedback then a mega launch of the new system is done and push for adoption

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Stage 3: Adoption and improvement

Create dedicated teams to drive adoption

This team would be assigned in user training and helping users in adoption to the new system

The key to adoption is the support that is given to users at the time they start using the new system, the more comfort they have with someone there to help them maneuver the new system the better the adoptions will be .

The dedicated team responsible for driving adoption will quickly get the feedback on areas the system needs to improve.. this immediate feedback would be valuable to the development team to make the necessary changes so that it further accelerates the adoption of the new system

Track adoption and report on a periodic basis the growth in adoption numbers, there are many who will start adopting when they observe others have started to adopt using the new system

Document learning and process documentation

The team to document all learning which can be used plan further projects better, also the documentation to be further improved with all the changes so that it becomes a working document for future training for the team

Capture the benefits delivered due to the digitization effort

Assign a person responsible within the team would would keep updating the process documentation as the changes are being done to the process … the more updated the document is the better will the training for future staff as they join the process

Improve digital performance leveraging Artificial intelligence (AI)

One of the advantage of digital adoption is the automated data collection, over a period of time the companies’ ability to collect and analyze customer patterns and behaviors gets better.

You must have heard the saying that data is the new oil. The biggest benefit of automation is the creation of data repositories which can be used for analysis and right interventions

The future is doing to be the era of Artificial intelligence and for artificial intelligence to work is depend on data , hence the more data you have it becomes the oil based on which your Artificial intelligence algorithms can be improved.

So going forward more and more tasks that are repetitive can by handled by AI ?

Artificial intelligence is evolving very fast and some of the used cases it is helping companies benefit are

a.?????? It can recommend the best next product to the customer at the right time giving the nudge when they interact on the platform

b.?????? It can help in better client engagement empowering Relationship Manager by giving a more in depth assessment ?of the customer .. that enables a more focus and fruitful discussion

c.?????? Helps build faster porotypes based on customer feedback … which can speed up the innovation and digitization journey

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The surprising fact is that while AI is able to perform complex tax with ease it struggles to solve common sense problems.

As it depends on data and statistics to infer there are correlation errors of false positive cases, further some of the long tail scenarios which are not common occurrence the system struggles to identify the right response ?.

Another limitation of AI is transfer of learning, the advantage of learning which humans have is that once we learn something we transfer the learning to other areas of life for example when a child learns to open a door knob, then then child quickly learns to transfer the knowledge of opening widows, other type of doors naturally with ease

However with AI if there is a small variation the transfer of learning does not happen it needs to build the algorithm completely again…

with all the limitation the there is no doubt of the usefulness of AI

The million dollar question everyone keeps asking ?is will AI replace humans going forward …

I endorse the observation given by Harvard review that going forward

"Humans using AI will replace Humans not using AI"

So it makes sense to embrace technology transformation in our organizations and following the above learning should hopefully make the transition less painful

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