Digital Transformation involves taking a customer-centric, digital-first view of the world. It aims to create and enhance products and services, transform business models, operations, customer experience and productivity and indeed enable industry transformation. It is all about coordinated digital change at scale across an enterprise but more importantly across an ecosystem. Digital is the catalyst that allows businesses and industries to be re-imagined, re-architected and re-engineered. It helps them to deliver transformational solutions and productivity. It is a continuous improvement and innovation process that enables companies to stay competitive in a digital economy.
Digital Transformation Strategy
Traditional IT strategy outlines the ways in which a business leverages technology to keep operations running. IT strategy is an essential component of a robust enterprise digital strategy. While IT often starts with a technology solution, a digital strategy outlines how technology solutions can map to business goals. The digital strategy focuses on technology but not on culture. Digital transformation strategies are large-scale attempts to build entirely new business models. These strategies involve using a combination of Digital technologies (AI, IoT, Blockchain, Industry 4.0, Cybersecurity ) and Digital tools like DevOps, AIOps, MLOps, Mobile Apps etc.
Key Building Blocks of Digital Transformation:
Organizations are looking for digital solutions to help them make products faster, better, and cheaper than before using new age forward-looking technologies. There are many benefits of digital transformation. Some of the major benefits are increased customer insights, reduce cost, improve time to market, and increased operational efficiency. Further, it includes transforming existing business processes, improving customer experience, and introducing new digital revenue streams. The main building blocks for digital transformation include customer experience, operational processes and business model. It mainly includes 6 key elements namely customer engagement, digital marketing, digital operations, digital innovation, transformational Leadership and data and analytics.
How to Develop a Digital Transformation Strategy
The formulation of the Digital transformation strategy focused on how value can be created and exploited using digital technologies. Further, keeping the customer at the center of the focus. Strategy implementation includes a roadmap that outlines the steps an organization needs to take to adopt a strategy. The roadmap should be tailored to the organization’s specific needs. Further, it should take into account the organization’s current state, its desired future state, and the gaps that need to be filled. Moreover, the Chief Digital Officer (CDO) needs to work closely with business unit heads along with the core business application or product owners. This will help in taking a strategic approach to digital transformation. Below are the steps involved while building a strategy.
Establish Goals and Objectives:
Understanding the industry’s level and doing research on specific market and industry segments at which digital transformation is progressing is very important to stay ahead of the game. Moreover, the overall digital transformation goals must be broken down into more specific objectives. It should be with timelines and an understanding of all costs involved.
Building the Digital Leadership Team:
Changing the way an organization operates requires leadership, teamwork and emotional intelligence. It also requires strong, efficient communication and courage.
Prepare for Culture Change:
Understanding digital transformation is a journey. Further, cultural change within the organization that supports innovation and digital change is created from a blend of capable digital tools with employee support.
Investing in the Right Technology:
Technology and technology partners are key components of a strategy. Depending on the organization, we may be looking to adopt new technology into our overall business strategy that includes a modern centralized integration platform.
Measure and Monitor:
Monitor for continuous improvement and new opportunities as digital technologies will keep evolving. Moreover, create a strong feedback loop with key stakeholders to ensure everyone is learning from the experience.
About the author:
Dr Rabi holds a PhD Degree in Computer Science and is currently working as a CTO in Crayon India, Bangalore. He is helping global customers for creating digital roadmaps and providing Data-driven AI-powered solutions. Addtionally, he has rich experience in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Data, AI and Cyber Security Ecosystems.
