Keeping up the momentum: Accelerated Digital Transformation

With the increase in digitization across all business areas, and the public use of data to support policy and safety decisions over the past year and a half, citizen comfort levels and expectations for use of technology are driving innovation. Information and analytics are now available at our fingertips, delivered in the most simple and elegant of ways, and citizens are becoming increasingly more technology- and data-savvy.

Smartphone apps are packed with personalized analytics, from banking and utilities apps that customize your services, to fitness apps and smart devices that leverage data to fine-tune your workout. There’s now an expectation that every service will be personalized, and that information will be delivered in real time.

During COVID citizens saw government leaders leveraging data to explain their decisions. The public now knows what’s possible with data and analytics, and are less tolerant of decisions based on opinion or gut-feel: if service providers have access to relevant information, data should be used to drive strategy, whether in relation to public health or any other area of government responsibility.

And the same can be said for consumer's expectations of the private sector.

The time is now for digital transformation

There are now a wealth of intuitive and effective enterprise data and analytics solutions available. It has never been easier to leverage advanced analytics, and consumers expect it as they are seeing more and more data and analysis at their fingertips on smart and mobile devices.

Adopting data analytic solutions extends beyond meeting your customers’ evolving expectations. These solutions introduce a more effective way to conduct and drive personalized business insights. Analytic technologies can improve data quality, matching and linking, generating insights in the process and governance, which ultimately leads to scalable evidence based decision-making and personalized service delivery.

For those who are yet to fully commit to digital transformation, it’s not too late. In fact, with so many companies having paved the way, you can expect to enjoy a far quicker and more significant return on investment, as tools and technologies are evolving to support the demand. But if they wait too long, organizations will risk losing a competitive edge.

The importance of digital transformation is clear, and has been launched years ahead, as a result of COVID. The businesses that have survived and thrived over the past two years are those that have embraced digitization and leveraged remote tools and data to drive business changes that support constantly changing policy and public safety needs.

The needs of employees and customers will continue to expand going forward, and a modern company needs to be able to evolve with that demand and expectation. Digital transformation and data strategies aren’t set and forget. They need to be incremental – constantly analyzed and improved to meet evolving needs and to allow your business to perform to its potential.

Given the above, it’s not surprising to hear that business leaders play the most critical role in digital transformation.

The role of business leaders in driving digital transformation

Successful digital transformation is driven from the top. Without an evangelist at the executive level, digital transformation may remain siloed and reduce the benefits.

Leaders are charged with not only driving the process forward, but putting up the frameworks that support leveraging and operationalizing data, analytics and AI for solving problems to avoid solutions being one-offs in silos or just understood by a small group of data analysts and data scientists. The foundations of data governance, employee skills enhancement and training and data management infrastructure all require executive initiative and support.

COVID has dramatically accelerated technology adoption, with many organizations acting on their 2025-2030 plans far ahead of schedule. On the flipside, organizations that were unable to digitally transform as effectively as their competitors have suffered. Every industry was touched over the past 2 years, from hospitality to retail, health to the public sector. Each developed a unique response to the challenges of COVID, but all responses leaned heavily on data and technology. Even the most tech-resistant organizations found themselves leaning on third party providers, from e-commerce platforms to team collaboration software to enable staff and customer access.

We all adjusted rapidly. It is important that organizations keep up the momentum and move forward as the new way of working will benefit from continued collaboration and a flexible approach to reaching citizens and consumers. Citizens and customers now expect streamlined access to information and services. Employees now expect greater work flexibility. As leaders we can’t go back to how things were before. We need to not just embrace but lean into these changes. We need to think about where we can go from here.

How to approach digital transformation

The exciting thing about digital transformation and making data-driven decisions is that there is a wealth of data available to understand the best move forward, making most decisions more effective and far less risky.

A modern leader should regularly ask themselves the following questions:

●?????How do we deliver better services to meet the changing needs of consumers?

●?????How do we customize service offerings to leverage changes in technology?

●?????How do we anticipate our clients’ needs before our competition?

●?????How do we exceed expectations by personalizing our services and products?

The answers to each of these questions will ultimately be found in data. You can look at current trends by joining data previously less accessible than today, you can extrapolate learnings and outcomes, and develop strategies that work toward the desired and projected future. This may include more accurate views on potential outcomes from consumer behaviours, increased efficiencies across your organization or risk reduction for equipment or product failures.

By building analytics and AI models into marketing, consumer profiling, medical diagnostics and treatment protocols and more, organizations open more opportunities to become digital leaders and exceed citizens’ and consumers’ expectations. As a society we have spent half a century collecting data through legacy transactional systems, and thanks to modern analytics solutions, we’re now able to leverage that legacy and increasingly available information to our advantage.

Data and analytics are no longer emerging technologies – they’re expected technologies. Accelerating your technology uptake will enable you to create a better future that you, your teams and your citizens and customers can embrace.