TRANSFORM YOUR CULTURE

THE HARDEST PART

Digital transformation – DT or DX for short – is all about how a company handles dealing with customers, using internal tools, and interacting with employees. It’s like a whole package of changes that help the organization become more tech-savvy. But the big challenge isn’t really about money. If they do it right, the company can end up saving on much more than operational costs. James Bilefield, a Senior Adviser to McKinsey, the global, management consultancy tells us:

“In my experience, culture is the hardest part of the organization to change. Shifting technology, finding the right talent, finding the right product set and strategy – that’s all doable, not easy, but doable. Hardest is the cultural transformation in businesses that have a very deep legacy and cultural roots.”

Put simply, the main force driving digital change is cultural transformation. It involves using new tools and setting up a whole new way for management and employees to communicate.

A TRICKY TRANSFORMATION

Digital Transformation is about bringing in exciting new technologies to change how a business works, from everyday operations to big decisions. It’s not just switching from old-school ways to digital tools. It also means shaking things up and rethinking how the company operates. But DT can get pretty confusing so let’s clear up two tricky things about it.

  • Customers drive change – Take a moment to remember the last time you used cash for a transaction or sent an important business message with a handwritten note and a stamp. It’s likely that many aspects of our lives have already gone digital. We’ve become accustomed to interacting with the outside world using digital methods. The change in mindset within organizations is primarily driven by how our customers’ behaviours change, and we have to adapt accordingly.
  • Digitalization isn’t transformation – Think about how things used to be when office documents were all stored on our computers. Now we’ve got cool cloud-based platforms like Google Docs, making shortage and sharing a whole lot easier – so much better than the old days of emailing back and forth. But digital transformation isn’t simply about swapping old tools for new digital ones. It means changing how we do things, both with technology and the way we think about using it. Just because we’ve gone digital doesn’t mean we’ve fully transformed. The real deal happens when technology and our mindset come together to bring about real changes in how we work and get things done.

THE FOUR ELEMENTS OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Digital transformation is a holistic approach that consolidates change of four main business components:

  • Core operations
  • Customer and employee experience
  • IT infrastructure

CORE OPERATIONS – TWO DT ROADMAPS

In the digital age, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for businesses. Some services that were once entirely physical couldn’t withstand the disruptive forces of digitalization. For example, with the rise of Netflix and Hulu, the entire video industry in the US became obsolete. On the other hand, many brick-and-mortar organizations experienced a subtler digital impact. Amazon didn’t eliminate the physical retail market; instead, it encouraged businesses to adopt new digital instruments. The varying degrees of product and service digitalization across industries influence the paths of their transformation. Adaptability is crucial in navigating this digital era. This means there are two digital transformation roadmaps to choose from:

  • Changing how you deliver – This approach involves modifying the operating model to enhance the existing workflow without fundamentally altering the core proposition. It is often employed in industries where the product is primarily physical, customers don’t anticipate significant shifts in the value proposition, and revenue is predominantly generated through non-digital methods.
  • Changing what you deliver – This transformation approach is chosen when the traditional revenue streams from physical offerings no longer align with the digital expectations of customers or partners. It begins by catering to digital-savvy customers and gradually evolves to redefine the core value proposition as more customers demand digital products. Eventually, the physical proposition is replaced with a digital counterpart to meet the evolving market demands.

DT CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

To optimize your customer and employee experiences, you can use DT to reshape your business by:

  • Individualizing customer experience – Companies can turn all the data about their customers into valuable insights and use them to provide individualized experiences. This helps them group customers better and meet their expectations more effectively.
  • Digitalizing operations and communications internally – If a company’s inner workings aren’t digitalized, its efforts to deal with customers will go to waste. For example, the marketing team getting hold of a complaint from a customer on social media won’t mean much if they can’t quickly pass it on to the customer service team digitally. Going digital inside the company is key to providing smooth customer interactions and fixing issues efficiently.
  • Optimizing and automating – These days, automation is everywhere, but shifting the focus of employee experience from boring tasks to more strategic and creative work is still a tough nut to crack. One way to tackle this is by setting up internal feedback loops and collecting data to make the overall employee experience better. This helps companies unleash the potential of their employees and foster innovation.

TRANSFORMING IT INFRASTRUCTURE

Old-school IT setups and private clouds can’t keep up with the rapid growth of endpoints and the applications needed to connect with them. That’s why companies are switching to the public cloud. It provides scalable computing power, a unified development environment, and allows users to access data from any device. The public cloud is a major driving force behind the ongoing digital transformation. Public cloud also enables dynamic computing, flexible app integration and operational accessibility across all endpoints such as laptops, smartphones, desktops and wearables. Many CIOs also believe that migration to the public cloud is a great way to mitigate security risks. Glenn Weinstein, CIO and senior VP at Google consulting firm Appirio explains:

“CIOs will implement measures to minimize security risks posed by desktop and laptop computers, by lessening users’ dependence on them as storage devices.”

DT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AND ANALYTICS

When we talk about analytics, the main idea is to stop making decisions based only on assumptions, experience, or gut feelings. Instead, we want to use data to make smarter choices. The big goals of analytics are to make things better by improving processes, cutting costs, giving customers a more personalized experience, and automating tasks using the data we gather and the best ways of doing things. A step in the right direction for doing this is to build a data-driven organization and you should drill down on these three actions:

  • Democratize access to data – Your organization probably collects loads of useful data already. But the usual problem is that different departments hoard their data, making it hard for others to understand the whole picture. If the C-levels step in and tackle this issue, it can kickstart analytics efforts and bring everyone on board to make the most of the data available.
  • Collect as much data as you can – When you dive into predictive and prescriptive analytics projects using the latest technology, the key is to gather as much data as you can. Go beyond just regular numbers; try to capture the decision-making process around the data and the level of confidence in those decisions. This valuable information can be used to create more robust machine-learning algorithms that give you deeper insights and better outcomes.
  • Evangelize change – In theory, going for data-driven decision-making sounds great, but in reality, getting people to think differently can be a tough nut to crack. Let’s take machine learning as an example. Those complex algorithms sometimes feel like black boxes, and we can’t always figure out why they predict certain things. On the other hand, people can back up their decisions with their own experiences, which is what makes them experts in their fields. So, if we want to make data-driven decisions work, it’s not just about the C-levels introducing the idea. They need to be strong advocates for it throughout your organization.

GET YOUR DT GOING

Digital transformation is more than a money-spinner. This year digitally transformed enterprises are forecast to account for $54 trillion or more than 50% of the global GDP. Underlying this massive figure are customer service and automation. Automation is a fundamental component of digitalization and digital transformation. I’ve been in the cybersecurity and IT support business for almost 20 years. While I might have cybersecurity and risk mitigation in my bones and blood, I’ve also moved on with the times, increasingly seeing why businesses need automation and digital transformation. Let’s get together soon. You’ll quickly see how digital transformation can rock your business culture, revolutionise the way you work, and keep your customers and team happy.

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