How to unlock value through digital transformation

In any transformation journey it is important have a clear vision, strategy, road-map and goals to unite everybody and help drive the organisational change required. With these in place, digital transformation has the potential to unlock value in many areas of your business. Let’s explore five of these in more detail.

Decision making

Data is all around us, and everything we do generates more. Physical objects are increasingly connected, autonomous and continuously generating data. Data driven enterprises need a framework for storing, organising and accessing all this data. Data is the asset, but most decisions are still taken by people. Empowering people with easy-to-use analytics tools is crucial to enabling the decision-making process. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning make it possible to churn through massive volumes of data, spotting patterns and anomalies that humans cannot, augmenting the decision-making process. Today’s volatile business landscape means decision-making needs to be quick to respond to challenges and identify opportunities. Trust is the final and critical factor required to decentralise decision-making and enable people to act quickly on what the data is telling them.

Connectivity

We live in a world of always-on and always-connected. Social media has changed the way we communicate and we expect the ability to communicate on multiple channels, instant responses and a highly personalised experience when interacting with any aspect of a brand.

Customer centricity should be placed at the heart of everything an organisation does. Connect with your customers on a human level, be transparent and authentic in everything you do. Allow for multiple channels of communication, and ensure consistency in the customer experience across these. More exacting expectations on the part of consumers, employees, and business partners are driving companies to develop more reliable and responsive processes. Evaluate traditional linear processes and identify opportunities to turn them into responsive and collaborative processes using multi-directional information flows across connected communication channels.

 Innovation

Understanding your customers’ needs and what they value drives innovation in the products and services arena. Customer centricity demands that you interact with your customers directly, engage in conversations with them and test new products and services through user experience testing during the conceptual and design phases. Innovation in business models allows small niche players to partner with other small niche players to offer end-to-end solutions that can compete with the major players in the market. Develop deep mastery in your chosen products and services and establish a network of trusted delivery partners. This will allow you to adapt and respond to market needs quickly.

Apply innovation in your operating models to enable agility and responsiveness. This means moving to more collaborative, flexible and iterative delivery models. In large, traditional organisations, this may mean that traditional and innovative operating models need to work in parallel, first to prove that the model works in small pockets and then transitioning the entire organisation to the new way of working over a period.

Automation

The 4’th industrial revolution is on the horizon and will see the arrival of smart facilities. These facilities will use internet enabled machines connected to systems that can visualise the entire production process, and make decisions without human intervention. This is an equally scary and exciting prospect. The impact will be felt in numerous ways across our societies. Organisations need to develop a strategy to manage this change. In the digital age, workflow automation is a way to ensure all the benefits of a structured process while reducing the amount of time your valuable human resources spend on repeatable tasks. Customers expect end-to-end purchase, fulfilment and servicing via digital channels. Identify touchpoints across the various customer journeys and develop a strategy for moving these to digital channels in a way that provides a consistent customer experience across all.

People

As the pace and scale of digital transformation increases, our humanity become more important than ever before. The mix of generations in the work place means you need a strategy and plan for managing change effectively at a granular level on the people front. Focus should be placed on how to frame the effects of change in a positive manner, and highlight the opportunities and possibilities that will exist in the future. By framing the change in a positive manner, you can eliminate fears and unleash creativity in your people, allowing them to potentially identify new roles and areas where people can add value in a digitally driven world.

Engage in open, transparent and honest conversation with your teams, in the same manner as you do with your customers in a customer centric culture. Placing people at the heart of your digital transformation is key in achieving the organisational wide culture change that is required to be successful.