More About Digital Transformation
But what is unclear to many business leaders is the true meaning of digital transformation. Is it just an attractive way to encourage the transition to cloud technology? Is it the automation of the processes? Is it the transfer of the business to social media?
It is also unclear what is tactical and strategic steps are needed to be taken. Do we need to design new jobs to help us create a framework for digital transformation? Or hire consulting firms? What are the elements of the new business strategy or that must be changed?
Is digital transformation worth it? Do we need the Digital Transformation?
Organizations need to evolve digitally to address the changing business landscape. The main mreasons for increasing importance of Digital Transformation are:
- Acceleration of Change – The pace of digital change is rising exponentially, making it very difficult to maintain a position of any industry leadership and requiring an acceleration of new digital solutions brought to market.
- Digital Competition – The increasing pressure of digital competition has forced the long-established businesses to reexamine their business models on the lines of new “born digital” start-ups.
- Customer Expectations – Customers expect a good experience across all touchpoints channels. It is important to ensure that their interactions are distinct and exceptional smooth interactions.
- Digital Nurturing – Digital adoption of Big data, automation, and IoT has made it necessary for organizations to transform completely.
At Jathwa, we strive to simplify solutions related to digital transformation and make it easy for our customers to keep up with the latest technological developments and to adapt to them adequately:
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is, in fact, a comprehensive transformation of the organizational activities of an organization that aims to take advantage of the opportunities that are created through digital technologies and data. This requires the organization to profoundly transform its business model, infrastructure, operations, and culture, all geared towards continually finding new sources to prioritize customer value.
In other words, digital transformation is the integration of digital technology in all areas of business and services. It is a fundamental change in how we manage and deliver optimum value to customers. It is also a cultural change that requires challenging the organization’s status quo and enhancing customer experience.
What are the impacts of Digital Transformation on people and organizations?
Impact on Executives:
This transformation means a change in the viewpoint of the managers governing the organization’s processes. It also calls for change among executives, who play a significant role in an organization’s strategy development and execution.
It requires executives to have a new vision and rethink their entire business execution process, changing everything suitably from the development of services/products to how it is marketed and serviced.
Digital transformation also requires executives to shift their attention from improving existing services/products to adapting to new changes and disruptive technologies. This process involves smartly automating new business processes, procedures, and data.
Also, integrating interactive customer channels to maintain a good customer relationship (experience and satisfaction).
Impact on Chief Officers (CXOs):
Digital transformation calls for change among Chief Officers (CxOs) who are the organization’s representatives.
It requires CxOs to:
- Adopt the innovation of the digital economy to define new ways of working, improve customer service, and invent technological platforms
- Guiding strategies and lead the way for the big change
- Introduce initiatives to change the brand and create and provide new needs and opportunities to reshape things for the future.
- Fashion a broad vision, suggest strategies, organize away from existing legacies and current habits, and push them towards a digital mindset.
Impact on Industries and Organizations:
Becoming a digital organization requires far more serious changes than simply investing in the latest technologies.
It calls for change in:
- Digital Framework: organizations need to adopt a transformation blueprint to build a clear digital transformation roadmap.
- Digital Business Models: organizations need to radically change how they identify, develop, and launch new business propositions.
- Digital Operating Models: organizations need to follow an agile approach to both core and support business functions.
- Digital Talent and Skills: organizations need to captivate, retain, and develop the proper talent
- Digital Business Capabilities: organizations need to assess existing capabilities, build new digital capabilities, or acquire missing capabilities in order to transform successfully.
- Digital Interaction Metrics: organizations need to adopt newer digital interaction metrics as traditional KPIs are no longer effective in a digital business.
Digital transformation impacted major industries:
- Insurance: digital in insurance sector has changed the way people avail insurance policies.
- Banking and Finance (BFS): digital adoption in the BFS sector has helped in upgrading from traditional banking to an Omni-channel approach. BFS organizations are aggressively modernizing technology infrastructure to enable current and future growth across all business sectors.
- Healthcare: the digital acceptance in the healthcare sector has revolutionized the entire patient experience, right from booking a doctor’s appointment, to follow-up laboratory results, to follow-up medicine renewal processes, etc. in a new and exciting way.
- Manufacturing: digital transformation revolutionizes the way manufacturers share and manage products development and engineering.
- Information Technology: The use of digital technologies to facilitate and improve the performance of companies and organizations is a recurring theme and has been gaining prominence worldwide. Executives from all sectors have started to use digital advances such as data analysis for decision making, mobility issues, social media and countless other smart devices incorporated into their daily routines. However, for many companies, the use of traditional technologies to optimize internal processes, responsive websites and applications for customer relationships are tangible examples of Digital Transformation.
- Travel: travellers are relying on digital channels and platforms for all their travel needs, from researching to booking. This has totally transformed their travel experience.
- Transport and Logistics: digital integration has helped in improving efficiency, speed, tracking, and timing, which form the core of transport and logistics industry.
- Utilities: mobility, intelligent devices, data analytics, and business process management systems constitute the digital ecosystem through which utilities can deliver unique digital customer experience, high operational efficiencies, and changing business models.
- Retail: digital integration has helped in creating personalized services to customers in the retail sector.
Major components involved in Digital Transformation
Enterprise Business models
Organizations need to refocus their strategy to transform their business model, technology infrastructure, data infrastructure, business processes, as well as culture and mindset, all geared toward constantly finding new sources of customer value.
Enterprise Technology and Processes
Increasing digital adoption among technology-savvy customers is changing the way they discover and evaluate when they purchase products and services. This inspires us to change how we deal with customers and create value by utilizing the latest technical and functional capabilities and redefining the value chain for customer service.
Enterprise Competition
Organizations are now competing not just with other organizations from within the industry but also with companies from outside the incumbent industry. They may find themselves competing fiercely with a long-standing rival in one area while partnering with the same company in another.
Enterprise Culture and Mindset
Digital is transforming how businesses innovate. It has enabled continuous testing and experimentation. Prototypes can be built quickly and tested with user communities, allowing constant learning and rapid iteration before full-fledged launch.
A digital strategy or a digital framework aligning all these components is crucial for any organization to prepare for the change and harvest the benefits of digital transformation.
Digital Framework Preview
It is rightly said that “Strategy, not technology, drives Digital Transformation.”
The adoption of upgraded technology does not ensure digital success. As per the 2015 Digital Business Global Executive Study and Research Project by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte, strategy is the key driver in the digital domain.
Being digitally fluent doesn’t refer to being a master in technologies. It actually demonstrates the ability to articulate the value of digital technologies to the organization’s future.
Digital Transformation is about transforming how an organization operates and engages with customers by leveraging technology and data.
What is a Digital Transformation Framework?
A digital transformation framework is a scheme or a blueprint for an organization to move through a period of significant change caused by evolving business conditions.
However, there is no framework that fits all! Companies have their own business transformation framework suited to their digital transformation strategy, customers, and employees.
Core Elements of Digital Transformation Framework:
People
Digital transformation calls for a greater focus on people, not just technology. Digital transformation requires people who:
- Are creative
- Have complex problem-solving capabilities
- Are lateral thinkers
- Have both flexibility and agility
- Drive collaboration across an ecosystem
Processes
The processes involved in this digital transformation framework includes:
- Assessing the implications of transformation: This stage is aimed at analyzing the necessities for adopting the change and its implication to organization health. This helps in deciding whether to adopt Digital Transformation all at once or in phases or not at all, with the required supporting documentation.
- Analyzing Internal business environment: This stage involves an in-depth analysis of what organizations can do to improve the current business processes. It helps to fetch the information regarding the key improvement areas of business to increase the sales, performance, and customer experience.
- Analyzing the range of transformation: This stage helps the organization to identify the changes in the internal processes/business that need to be made. These changes would include processes, list of activities, and business model changes.
- Processes Prioritization: The fourth stage is all about prioritizing the processes to gain maximum benefits and returns. This helps to fetch a clear roadmap for the identified changes.
- Announcing the transformation: This stage involves communicating the what, when, how, changes that an organization is trying to activate in the digital transformation front.
- Executing the change: This stage involves deploying the changes that are planned and analyzing the impact. This helps to form a trained team that is capable of handling a digitally transformed business in the future.
- Ready to use: The final stage in the framework is about making the new system available for production usage. This helps in creating a clear roll-out plan with clearly identified roles, responsibilities, and timelines.
Technology
The digital world is full of short acronyms. But there is one that elegantly summarizes the technologies used to support digital transformation: SMAC-IT – Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, and Internet-of-Things. All of these technologies are essential for creating a digital business. Organizations are adopting various digital technologies based on their priorities:
- Social Media Technology: social media are interactive technologies that focus on communication, community-based input, interaction, content-sharing, and collaboration. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the like represent only the social dimension of digital technologies. Social networks create an opportunity, as well as a threat, for business reputations.
Beyond the social media juggernauts, there are many different types of social media to connect online for all kinds of personal and business reasons:
• Social networks—Connect with people
• Media sharing networks—Share photos, videos, and other media
• Discussion forums—Share news and ideas
• Bookmarking and content curation networks—Discover, save and share new content
• Consumer review networks—Find and review businesses
• Blogging and publishing networks—Publish content online
• Interest-based networks—Share interests and hobbies
• Social shopping networks—Shop online
• Sharing economy networks—Trade goods and services
• Anonymous social networks—Communicate anonymously - Mobile (Mobility) Technologies: mobile or mobility technologies are the most noticeable technological creativity of recent years offer people the freedom to move. No longer tied to a specific place to communicate, they have attached to a ubiquitous existence thanks to a highly personal device.
‘Mobile First’ is, rightly, the watchword of the new marketing professionals in a digital world. Innovative, disruptive business models are appearing, based on the use of mobile technologies as a priority. These technologies utilize the two main advantages of mobile devices: geolocation and real-time. An example is the technology used in the Uber mobility application. Uber count on the value of its integrated customer services and unconventional business model on the importance of its mobile application. - )Big( Data and Analytics Technology: Big data analytics is the use of advanced analytic techniques against enormous, diverse data sets that include structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data from different sources and in various sizes from terabytes to zettabytes. The foremost Big Data top technologies trending since 2020 are:
1. Artificial Intelligence
2. NoSQL Database
3. R Programming Language
4. Data Lakes
5. Predictive Analytics
6. Apache Spark
7. Prescriptive Analytics
8. In-memory Database
9. Blockchain
10. Hadoop Ecosystem - Cloud Computing Technology: cloud computing is driven by a shared network of physical data warehouses hardware (storage), infrastructure (servers), software system, and services (applications) that run on the Internet (the “cloud”) instead of on a local device. Cloud computing processes data and is provided by a privately-owned cloud service or a third-party cloud provider. Here are some examples of such cloud services:
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Salesforce
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): DigitalOcean
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Amazon Web Services
• File Sharing + Data Storage: Dropbox
• Big Data Analysis: Civis Analytics
• Data Governance: Carbonite
• Cybersecurity: Forcepoint - Internet of Things (IoT) Technology: The Internet of things describes the network of physical objects—”things” or objects—that are embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies to connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet. Best IoT technologies since 2020 are:
1. Home Security
2. Activity Trackers
3. Digital Twins
4. Self-Healing Machines
5. AR Glasses
6. Ingestible Sensors
7. Smart Farming
8. Smart Contact Lenses
9. Industrial Security and Safety
10. Motion Detection
