While these questions seem obvious, there are numerous reasons why they are often overlooked and we don’t bridge the what, why and how or the intent and achievement. A solid strategy includes analysing current processes, identifying pain points and risks, and then working out which digital tools could improve this. To do so, you need to grasp what role they play in the bigger picture of digital transformation, while identifying the glue that connects them and that in the end enables you to make a solid difference with your strategy. Digital strategies in the most mature organizations are developed with an eye on transforming the business. As with any transformation, employees must understand what it is they need to support before you can drive buy-in and adoption. ], After James Swanson, CIO and head of digital transformation at Bayer Crop Science, developed a transformation strategy, it was time to evaluate the team, he said. Does your change management plan cut it in the digital age? A digital transformation strategy is a detailed plan for how your business will address key challenges created by the convergence of the physical, digital, and human worlds. Highlight both benefits and challenges and tie it to strategy and winning. In this intensive five-day Digital Transformation Strategy course you will gain the skills to develop and implement a digital strategy within your organisation. Compare the latter with marketing ROI. Walk through a day in the life of a typical employee living with all the features of a digital work environment. A digital transformation strategy is working out where exactly you could apply such technology and what the returns and benefits of this could be. If an IT leader hasn’t done so already, now is the time to step back … Lead from the Front. Gap bridges with customers and stakeholders. Digital transformation is about evolving and augmenting—not replacing—human capabilities. But don’t rush into digital transformation without first laying a solid foundation for success. They can’t respond to the increasingly end-to-end digital transformation strategy needs of companies as they miss the profound IT and information management skills. Building a business that can leverage emerging technology and ride new opportunities with speed skill and determination, often requires a transformed way of working. Everything about digital transformation and disruptive business models seems to go against the traditional IT concepts of risk containment and controls. We do know that they are interconnected and strengthen each other, not for the sake of the technologies themselves but because in that Nexus of Forces they are inherently dependent of each other and simply overlap if you go deeper. New digital professions are now established across the public sector. Not many companies have even the slightest idea of developing a robust roadmap for their digital transformation initiative. You will be changing or breaking processes that have been in place and have worked well at some point. This nine-week live virtual programme is designed to help you plan and build a digital transformation strategy that can be taken away and implemented. Lean transformation with an adaptive case management approach, a focus on the 3Ps and room for failure and iteration as in a continuous Bèta model (more here) offer ways to tackle these challenges. You can’t skimp on any of them – especially number seven. Increased mobility: Not only do consumers spend several hours a day on mobile devices, but employees are tied to smartphones, tablets, and laptops. So, that is what we try to achieve. and Deloitte’s1 2015 global study of digital business found that maturing digital … And to do so, a holistic mindset, common sense, some distance and a profound understanding of how everything can be connected in the scope of a unique purpose are needed. The question for leading companies has become: how do we turn all this data into actionable intelligence in a meaningful, prioritized and profitable way, leading to new opportunities. This uncertainty of missing building blocks or having the wrong ones is often what makes organizations uncertain as they fear failure in regards with the proper mapping of the needed building blocks (subprojects, people, processes, information sources, change management initiatives, built-in checks and so forth). In addition, we have an ongoing need to build competencies that augment our skills, especially around business acumen. Many digital transformation projects take mobility as a central theme. Be realistic up-front and build many stakeholder checkpoints into the plan to ensure transparent progress is being made. Subscribe to get the latest thoughts, strategies, and insights from enterprising peers. The thing is that we often tend to approach all these technologies from a somewhat siloed perspective. Regardless of how you look at it, there is always one crucial challenge that comes back as just mentioned. The answer: by understanding all the components, technologies and others, we mentioned in this articles and building bridges on the essential levels where they aren’t constructed yet but where they should be in order to get that agile and holistic innovation and optimization capacity that stretches far beyond the hype of the day and is designed with a longer term strategy in mind. We hear this time and time again, whether we speak with experts in a specific domain such as the Internet of Things, CIOs, CMOs, information managers, you name it: all too often there is a lack of attention for the essential questions that also apply in digital transformation or any technological or other project or process. Customer-centricity, customer-facing processes and the end-to-end customer experience are key in digital transformation strategies. Objective setting relates to the control stage where it's important to use the right dashboard and performance review approach to improve performance. The first step to creating a digital transformation strategy is changing your company’s … By bringing people together that don’t get lost in the noise of the day but are able to see and…to build bridges. You are responsible for ensuring that you have the necessary permission to reuse any work on this site. Point of view. Thus, to implement a successful Digital Transformation strategy, an enterprise must-1. In an economic reality where entire industries are changing, actionable intelligence is the new currency. You may have heard that 70 percent of digital transformations fail. They set up hackathons, organize brainstorming session days and launch trials in order to prepare for the longer term, as they decreasingly rely upon those first moving ‘digital transformation experts’ who have been repeating the same stories too long too often. This will change as the market matures, just as it did before the dot com bubble when numbers, predictions and the tech talk dominated the debates very often as well, leading to inflated expectations and hype. “If the technology you’re deploying is new to your business, it is always more difficult to anticipate how things will work. Transformation cannot be driven out of IT only; rather it must be fully aligned with the organization’s overall path, goals, mission, heritage, and planned future.”, [ Digital transformation requires true partnerships. Get the ebook: Digital transformation, the open source way. A look at key questions to ask for your digital transformation strategy. There are ample bridges to be built from a human perspective. Connect technologies and data (sources) in function of strategy. However, as Barry Brunsman, principal with KPMG’s CIO Advisory recently told us, these very characteristics demand the diligent design of risk management and controls around the digital transformation effort. Here are two things you can already start doing as of right now: Some digital transformation strategy steps to take into account (and that can be put in the context of the previously mentioned three core capabilities, as well as the, also previously depicted vision, plan, action steps): Top image: Shutterstock – Copyright: Sergey Nivens – All other images are the property of their respective mentioned owners. What can you do to give your digital transformation the best chance of succeeding? Digital transformation demands executive vision and leadership. Strategy and governance ", "But if you were to push me on identifying a single critical piece of the puzzle – one that is often done poorly – then I would point to careful consideration of the cultural aspects of transformation," said Wade. Focus on core intangible assets: customers, data. The critical piece: Prepare for culture change. Read also: Meet the Chief Transformation Officer: 8 key tasks for this new role. We know the possibilities of digital technologies are enticing and that mounting competitive pressure creates urgency. In many industries, the digital winners’ circle is still up for grabs. Less digitally mature organizations tend to focus on individual technologies and have strategies that are decidedly operational in focus. None of these ‘technologies’ are really new and often have their roots in other technologies we mention less or have forgotten about. And smart digital strategy, like traditional business strategy, is about making wise investment choices to maximize competitive advantage, growth, profit, and value—and then implementing with discipline. What do you want to achieve, why do you want that, how do you get there, who do you need, is there a clear and calculated case that supports your intent and how are you going to gauge whether you achieved or not? Many leading ‘incumbents’ are increasingly setting up environments where they give room to innovation, experimentation and future-oriented sessions, in order to shape their digital transformation strategy. Like The Enterprisers Project on Facebook. In a business reality where ‘the business’, with a leading (yet, non-exclusive) role for marketing and the CMO, increasingly takes decisions on technology budgets, we see that it’s often hard for IT and information management professionals, who are essential in digital transformation, to speak the language of the CMO or other business executives, which traditionally didn’t belong to their ‘target audience’. It’s not just the IT and information management people that struggle to speak the language of, let’s say, the CMO. The power of a digital transformation strategy lies in its scope and objectives. Leverage the existing and emergent technologies to transform the business. It has always been in our top 10 of business books and in the holistic reality which business is and which digital transformation also is and requires to succeed, it could inspire you as it inspired us. The Enterprisers Project is an online publication and community focused on connecting CIOs and senior IT leaders with the "who, what, and how" of IT-driven business innovation. Figuring out how to answer that question and make it meaningful for everyone involved is the first major step in your digital transformation journey. In practice, it requires building many bridges to remove gaps and chasms that are still prevalent. The other way around, many marketing executives, don’t speak the language of IT and/or are not used to think and work in terms of business process management, essential technological evolutions and concepts or methods of business process reengineering and/or business process optimization. They hook up with others with whom they can create new ecosystems of value. “There isn’t a single ‘make or break’ step in a digital … However, you should never forget that it’s important to build bridges between your understanding and the goals you want to achieve on one hand and the bridges to build between all the technologies that fit in your individual business context. On one hand we see that often digital transformation is seen as a set of projects, actions and exercises to do or a more enterprise-wide goal to achieve. At the same time, information management requires a holistic and integrated approach. It’s one of the reasons why IT firms are building or acquiring ‘digital transformation consultancies’ with roots in marketing/business or even agencies, which can help them in properly understanding and addressing the needs of these a-typical audiences. Have clarity on its strategic vision. What most companies consider digital transformation is the equivalent of collecting fondue sets, Nils Fonstad, MIT CISR research scientist, said at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. Get the digital transformation eBook:  Teaching an elephant to dance. "Without addressing culture, transformation will probably fail. Further, digital transformation cuts across every function and every budget, and all functional teams need to be on board. All the mentioned bridges need to be built. Do you have the right culture to adopt change? We help companies develop their digital talent plans in areas like data science and human-centered design. Data allows us to find new opportunities much more easily. It’s probably not that hard to imagine how much bridging of processes, people, information sources and existing silos and gaps that requires. A good marketer will always strike a balance between activities with more certain outcomes and proven results and activities with less certain or uncertain outcomes which could be unexpectedly high gains or, if it doesn’t work that well, losses that don’t affect the overall ROI too much. Setting out for digital transformation without a definite strategy is like a bird without wings. Departments have become better at sharing platforms and components, code, patterns and bes… To avoid this, Fonstad said companies must set parameters around digital transformation that let them continually test hypotheses, gain actionable learnings, and either adapt or discard experiments along the way. Artificial Intelligence is the ability of a machine or software to develop human … Keep up with the latest thoughts, strategies, and insights from CIOs & IT leaders. On this site we often refer to the core technologies as the third platform (a term coined by IDC) or SMAC and sometimes SMACIT. Finding new revenue streams together by connecting systems of value and building bridges is key here as well, and is enabled by a technological reality that increasingly revolves around data, actionable intelligence, software and connectivity. We need more and stronger bridges with customers in ways which require more depth and breadth (and personalization) than ever. The reason we mention it is because co-opetition is also de facto what we see happening in several markets where so-called incumbents and so-called disruptive companies understand that it’s better to collaborate in competing for specific markets than to go in from purely competitive approaches. Here's how to let remote team members know you appreciate their hard work and commitment throughout 2020's adversity. When you look at these various technologies, whether it’s from their individual traits and evolutions (books are written about each one as they cover many underlying realities and are all de facto umbrella terms) and when you look at how they are often covered, it’s easy to forget how they are really part of one single, more holistic, perspective, which is defined by the end goals why we ‘invented’ them and why we use them. ]. That’s why it’s important to conduct VoC exercises and strategic sessions with various people. This is obviously a journey that never ends. ", "We retooled the IT department to move away from some of the commodity skills to more forward-looking capabilities that align with our strategy. Stay tuned as we’ll look deeper into digital transformation strategy and a framework/roadmap that guides your strategy by asking the right questions and connecting the right dots. We invite you to read the classic ‘Coopetition‘, essentially meaning ‘cooperation and competition’, which Adam M. Brandenburger and Barry J. Nalebuff already wrote in 1996. A digital transformation strategy is a plan of action to reposition a business in the digital economy. Their increasing maturity, as well as their increasing adoption, has led to what Gartner called the Nexus of Forces. This will help ensure your stakeholders are actually ready for the journey, while your organization, team, and partners are learning how to implement effectively and successfully.”, [ Read also: What is a digital platform? These courses are suitable for Executive and Business Leaders interested in developing a vision and strategy for digital transformation within their organisations. The critical piece: Prepare for culture change. There always is one, you just don’t know how big it will be and which areas will be most affected. What benefits will it … One of many reasons is that often we are partially and in a sense by definition operating in relatively uncharted territory and aren’t sure if we have all the building blocks. At the same time we’re also forced to understand them individually. To successfully navigate digital transformation and protect against digital disruption, all organizations need to developed three core capabilities says Professor Michael Wade: hyper-awareness, informed decision making and fast execution. The strength of ecosystems and communities of innovation, collaboration and also outsourcing partnerships, defines the strength of the businesses which are part of them in a culture of co-opetition and co-creation. “There isn’t a single ‘make or break’ step in a digital … Leverage effective digital technologies that people really want . Identify market, evolutions, pain points. To accept risk and tolerate failure? You may be the best UX person around, but if you aren’t competent with your business acumen, you won’t be successful.”, [ Who should lead transformation? Digital transformation is not a thing, it’s partially a journey and partially a goal, but most of all it requires a clear roadmap and strategy with ample room for adjustment in an adaptive way. “That likely includes changing or breaking processes that have been in place and have worked well at some point, changing how stakeholders interact with their clients, even changing their roles. It will help you come up with creative solutions to level up your business in this digital age. Be sure to identify both obvious and non-obvious stakeholder groups. The opinions expressed on this website are those of each author, not of the author's employer or of Red Hat. You really need to know what the Internet of Things is and can do, beyond what you believe it is and how important it will be. Benefits of a successful digital transformation strategy. Digital transformation strategy course overview. Previously, Carla worked at a PR agency with clients across the digital marketing and technology industry. Judith Apshago, VP of IT for Amtrak Corporate and Operations Technologies, shares lessons on prioritizing in uncertain times. Digital Transformation - Application. Since the … A digital transformation strategy starts with answering essential questions such as the what, why, how and who. “People toss around the term ‘cloud’ freely, but few employees really understand where the cloud is let alone how it works. Carla Rudder is a writer and editor for The Enterprisers Project. The Internet of Things is just one example here as, in all honesty, we are still at the start. However, in order to reap the benefits and potential, it’s not enough to understand what you can with these technologies. Learn, measure, re-assess, scale, innovate. We live in an age where over the past decades new technologies have emerged (some more recently) and gradually became core components of the ways we do business and the ways we live. 4. What we often see in practice is that the mentioned challenge is not always a matter of uncertainty regarding outcomes but also a matter of uncertainty regarding the “how”: the uncertainty regarding what the outcome will look like (as we do speak about change and this something new) is then strengthened by uncertainties whether all the (right) building blocks are foreseen and/or in place to get there. A digital transformation strategy builds bridges between current state and desired long-term plan. It’s not because you have digitally transformed in the now, that there won’t be new occasions, challenges and chances, brought upon us by new technologies. To embrace new ways of doing things, like new ways of working or new technologies? 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