What is digital transformation?

Defining digital transformation

“Digital transformation is a foundational change in how an organization delivers value to its customers”

— cio.com

“Digital transformation about using technologies to create and modify processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market needs”

— Salesforce

“Digital transformation is an effort to enable existing business models by integrating advanced technologies”

— McKinsey

Focus + process

Digital transformation is the reimagining of what your business could be. It involves focusing on your business’ mission, upskilling your people, re-engineering business models and processes and improving your customer’s experience.

Five steps towards digital transformation from an internal perspective…

Digitise everything. All paperwork, audio, videos, technical drawings, maps etc. should be available online.
Make it secure and searchable. Are the files readily available, permissioned appropriately, and tagged with metadata to allow for the data to be used in new and different ways?
Move calls, email messages and attachments into systems. Can requests be standardised and moved into a workflow rather than being phone calls and emails? Can attachments be shared as collaborative online documents?
Streamline those processes. Automate data transfer where possible. Integrate decision recommendation or decision-making AI.
True digital transformation: Push organisational myopia to the side, reimagine the customer journey from the customer’s perspective; embed predictive analytics and insights and transform processes to create significant benefits. Can you become a platform?

Five benefits of digital transformation from a customer’s perspective…

Transparency: It gives you real-time insight into what is happening (Think: tracking your pizza being made or your parcel or other request being completed).
Accessibility: It provides access to your account, profile, payment settings, history, usage statistics and more.
Recommendations: Not just “customers who got A also got B” but an AI-level of lead-scoring that tracks what you are interested in. Perhaps what others who have similar interests also look at or other pieces of data could interest you. It puts useful information, insights and recommendations at your fingertips.
Exceptional service: That is both proactive and contacts you (especially if there might be a problem), doesn’t require phone calls (unless you want one) and places the customer in control.
Delight: Improvements, tailoring and performance that surprises and delights (which keeps on bringing you back).

Ensuring digital transformation success

From Bains Consulting Group (BCG), to the Harvard Business Review, Forbes and McKinsey, digital transformation specialists agree that the programme needs to be owned from the top, aligned with organisation culture and drive by exception talent. It also needs time to get right.

Avoid common digital transformation pitfalls with:

Strong leadership spearheaded by the CMO or CIO or even better the CEO.
Good change management so you turn resistance into evangelism.
Upskilling internal talent and hire the right talent to support your effort.
A clearly articulated “why” and how it will benefit customers and in turn your organisation.
Time for the project to succeed and improve iteratively.

And ensure digital transformation success by…

Designing based on an outside-in customer-centric approach.
Aligning the transformation with your mission, values, expectations and behaviours.
Rethinking the art of what is possible when redesigning processes.
Selecting data-friendly systems for input, extract, analysis and auditing.
Getting the right team (which includes insiders) in place.

Digital transformation can be big or small

Digital transformation could start as marketing or recruitment automation that combines or replaces multiple processes. Perhaps it is even empowered with some AI or lead-scoring models and some degree of personalisation. It can also tie into your digital data analytics - especially when using predictive forecasting and recommendation engines.

For a medium-size example of digital transformation, let’s take Blinkist (one of our favourite apps) which distills non-fiction books into key insights that you can listen to or read. Turning a book into an ebook is digitisation. Selling ebooks online like a book store is digitalisation. But distilling those books into key insights and making them available for listening via a subscription service is transformative.

And finally, what’s the next big thing?

Beyond the obvious Ubers, Dominos and Netflix of the world, what’s next? What will the internet of things (IoT) bring? What opportunities will our collective move towards net zero create? Whatever they are, we think they’ll have two things in common. First, they’ll re-engineer their organisation to put the customer in the center and their people behind the technology. That is, you can start, complete and finish transactions without talking to a person — unless that’s what you want. Second, the organisation’s purpose, mission and focus on those will be central to everything they do.