Part 1: What is Digital Transformation and how do you transform your company; in English, not 'Gartnerspeak'.

Thoughts on Digital Transformation – Part One

The premise seems easy; “we want to digitally transform our company.” 

But what does this mean?

I have been spending quite a long time in the last few years, trying to streamline and understand how to approach ‘digital’ and how it can be used in the real world (rather than in a Gartner world).

How can we turn ‘digital’ into an enterprise capability rather than just having it as a buzzword wrapped around “transformations”?

Fundamentally I think that it breaks down thus:

Digital leaders should work across the company involving as many streams as possible:

-         The executive leadership.

-         The product and channel leadership.

-         The operational functions (Finance, HR etc.)

-         The workforce.

-         The customers.

-         Any pertinent external relationships.

The goal of a digital leader would be someone who can articulate the digital vision and then build the strategy across the business to enable it. He or she would then leverage technology/process/data to inform and deliver the solutions and improvements that have been discussed and agreed.

So, perhaps a digital leader would work across the business building up digital KPIs that would address most of the concerns of a business (processes, speed, value, differentiation etc.). Then these KPIs would be used as benchmarks to transform the business right across departments and processes.

A digital business strategy could start out looking at two over-arching goals:

Digital Business Optimisation

-         Improving productivity, revenue, margins and the customer experience by leveraging new technologies and data analytics. An example here would be improving process times (from weeks to days), or reducing the time taken to complete an order.

Digital Business Transformation

-         Utilising new technologies and/or data analytics to create net-new revenue, products or services. For example, this could be enhancing products that are already in the portfolio, or providing a new automated support service or data insight that a customer would be willing to pay for.

-         Creating new business models that transform the way the business is run. This could include for example, creating a portal or APIs that automate integration with vendors to provide new offerings.

But where do you start?

I’ll share my thoughts on this in my next blog….