What Does A Digital Transformation Imply ?

Recently, I came across a very insightful article (1)(written prior Covid 19 crisis) stating that

“Digital doesn’t have to be disruptive” and that “the best results can come from adaptation rather than reinvention”

It caught my attention regarding my experiences and exchanges I had with managers and professionals. I took the main points and addressed them in this short article.

Will any Company become a Digital and Tech company ?

Indeed, some managers and professionals have a vague idea of what “digital transformation” means and tend to see it as a complete “disruption” but with no view of what this really entails. This misunderstanding on the concept has had an impact on their decisions to engage or operate the changes needed.

But it has taken on a heightened importance in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. According to IDG Research, 59% of 373 IT decision makers say that the pandemic has put pressures on accelerating their digital transformation efforts. Also consumers have been pushing on the matter which implies to set the framework.

In Digital Transformation, the focus is to “keep our eye on the ball” (“client’s needs”) and organisations would use digital technologies as means to respond to client needs and continuously evolve all aspects of its activity. Digital implies more business and organisation adaptation.

Also, it’s rather adjusting to the current industrial revolution than a revamp for new challenges where IT moves from a supporting role to a more strategic and decision making role. The question is, how to “transform” / evolve and basically where to start ?

Even though, academics (2) highlight 3 key areas of digital transformation such as (i) Customer experience, (ii) Operational processes and (iii) Business models, a key factor of success of any initiative should be to identify and understand client’s needs.

Indeed, hyper-personalization and virtualization encourages organizations to move up the value chain in order to respond more rapidly and capitalize on rapid feedback loops.

According to a Bain & Company study, leading organizations spend more on transforming their businesses instead of just running it which gives them a competitive advantage in the long term.

only 8% (3) of the global companies have been able to achieve their targeted business outcomes from their investments in digital technology.”

Before rushing into a Transformation Digital, it is important to define the client needs, where is our organization positioned ? What are our goals ?, what type of new technologies can we capitalize on to achieve them ? and finally what are the key milestones ?.

Our Experience As Digital Transformation Advisor

At Continuous, we have been engaged in several missions of digital transformation from the creation and scale up of a start up to the spin off of a business activity.

The creation or scale up of a start up implies a more straightforward approach as they adopted the digital approach from the beginning. Indeed, one usually starts with a blank page and can therefore implement the state of technologies. The challenge lies more in keeping the start up simple, agile and avoiding technical debt accumulation.

In the case of a “classic” organisation, first, one need to map the current value stream with (i) review of the current strategy, business model and flow, (ii) review a product and client needs finally (iii) current and future market trends and distribution channels.

Second, one designs the degree of digital and new technologies adoption with the impact it will have on the organisation. It is even more acute in the case of a spin off of activity where one needs to have a clear view of the target organisation and the clients needs. Therefore, it’s recommended to restate client’s needs through feedback and to highlight the main trends using client satisfaction surveys which would also direct the digital initiatives of the target organisation.

In one of our missions the following trends had been identified: quality of products, speed of services, hyper-personalized pricing policy, simplicity in general process and client relationships. And referring to digital, three areas of attention have been identified such as portal, sales and communication and demands processing.

From that point, we were able to build up a digital environment with the target organization, human interactions and IT architecture.

Sources:

(1) https://hbr.org/2019/07/digital-doesnt-have-to-be-disruptive

(2) MIT Sloan Management

(3) It’s a relative low score https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-nine-elements-of-digital-transformation/?use_credit=2ee2b82af4bb59ba0c5773d149146e05