5 Rules of Digital Transformation
Digital transformation takes more than technology alone! Here are 5 areas that are critical for me. By no means exhaustive.
1. Don't call it Digital Transformation. Call it People Transformation so that you focus on your customers and your employees, not on the technology alone. There are plenty of tools and technologies available but you need to find the ones that fit your organisational needs by understanding processes and people. The starting point is to craft your customer journey and then define the focus areas for e.g. improvement in productivity, better customer service, reshaping the entire journey, speed to market, D2C initiatives. Link the objectives to business outcomes. To understand why I am focused on people, read my earlier article: Don't Think Digital Transformation, Think People Transformation. Here's Why.
2. Go Big Or Go Home - Focusing on just one area of business or one department will get limited results. Think about the customer journey. Your entire company is involved in that, in different ways. Reshaping only a part of it will still have some broken experiences. And the potential to create a whole new digital business can come about only if you rethink transformation across the company.
3. Adaptability is critical as you may fix a journey, fix the transformation structure but realise through the implementation design that you need to rethink roles or rethink critical process flows or change team structures entirely. It can rarely progress exactly as you thought it would at the start. You might take a year to implement change but the year will bring more changes in the way customers interact, in the way competitors do business. That's why agile ways of collaborative working are so important.
4. Don't think of data and analytics as an outcome, but rather as part of the objective. What kind of data do you wish to see - both as internal metrics and external metrics? Think about that. This will also evolve but there needs to be a starting point so that the metrics and measurement contribute to KPIs across departments. All metrics will contribute towards Customer Lifetime Value.
5. Involve the frontline. It’s not only about the corporate office, the leadership team or key people alone. The success comes from involving line managers and frontline staff who interact with customers everyday. If they don’t understand what you are doing and why, the first customer interaction itself will be broken.
Some more of my thoughts on the impact of Digital Transformation on businesses are here - this was my keynote for Middlesex University Dubai's International Conference on Technology, Innovation and Sustainability in Business Management.
TL;DR:
Think People Transformation, not Digital Transformation
Go Big or Go Home - think of transformation across the business
Be adaptable to change as you implement; be agile
Data and analytics should not be an outcome, measurement and metrics should be thought of from the start
Involve your frontline staff and line managers