Key Elements of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is a journey by an organization, not a destinations. Its start from the digitization, digitalization and digital transformation by adopting/integrating technologies to change the way any?organization operates, communicates, and engages with customers. It may be daunting task to achieve, but it has to have clear strategy and plan to accomplish.

To achieve the end goal, there are few key elements which needs to taken care based on my interactions with digital leaders and market success stories;

1. Define the goal and vision : It includes with understanding of current state of an organization, business ecosystem, value chain and customers. It has to be pragmatic with existing resources and infrastructure.
2. Digital strategy buy-in by CxO's/leadership: Cross functional leadership team or CDO /CXO commitment, business priority and buy-in for the strategic changes are very essential to achieve the vision.
3. Agile process: Agile focus is to move things and changes quickly by an organization. It not only on the time/pace, it takes to hit the target overall ROI while it also enrich overall quality products and enable more happy going customers. Again its not just process, this need change/agile mindset with defined structure, willingness to experiment, reinvent and execute.
4. Focus on customer experience: Digital transformation is not to do with internal organization changes through technology adoption, talent and cultural changes. It has critical KRA to focus on customers. The end goal of transformation is to address and bring seamless customer experience to the organization the way you want to interact and serve their needs to have happy customer experience (CX) through DX (Digital experience).
5. Technology strategy: Choosing and adopting right technology for the digital transformation journey is very critical. Wrong selection will end up failing entire vision. Technologies to enable organizations to collect and analyze data, automate process, engage customers at scale and pace.
6. Skills and talent: Over and above, having or choosing right skill competency across talent pyramid is the very critical success component. The transformation journey must have tech-savvy champions with open mind set to adopt changes and experimenting things rapidly.
7. Data driven approach: A holistic and strong data-driven approach helps organization to make precise decision across hierarchy. Create and build right IT infrastructures to collect and analyze variety of data from difference sources in large volume at high velocity. This serves leadership and organizations to visualize the progress and also RED flags too!.
8. Metrics to measure & continuous improvement: Select different KPI's and metric's in place, throughout the digital transformation journey right from beginning. A well thought through goals have to have defined metrics to measure different stages of progress. It will also helps KPI owners to adopt any change management and area's of improvements. Continuous learning, evaluation and feedback mechanism are the ways to improve better digital transformation strategy and execution. It requires matured cultural mind-set and willingness to experiment

In every down time teach organizations or market to enable to bring new ways of business model and compel some transformation for either survival or growth. To scale the business growth in most efficient way, going after digital transformation in an organization becoming inevitable in this era and future of digital business model.

The need of digital technologies can vary business to business from CRM, martech, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, information security, internet of things/connected devices, 3D printing, mobile applications, intelligence automation and can be any. But the way it has to be executed with right approach and constructive elements such as right vision, talent, technology, leadership buy-in, customer focus, data and continuous improvement are very important to avoid failures in digital transformation journey.