Leveraging the Opportunities of Digital Technologies
Digital transformation is the profound and accelerating transformation of business activities, processes, competencies and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies and their impact across society in a strategic and prioritized way, with present and future shifts in mind.
The development of new competencies revolves around the capacities to be more agile, people-oriented, innovative, customer-centric, aligned and efficient. The goal is an ability to move faster from an increased awareness capability regarding changes to decisions and innovation, keeping in mind those changes.
Present and future shifts and changes can be induced by several causes, often at the same time, on the levels of customer behavior and expectations, new economic realities, ecosystem/industry disruption and (the accelerating adoption and innovation regarding) emerging or existing digital technologies. In practice, end-to-end customer experience optimization, operational flexibility and innovation, are key drivers of digital transformation, along with the development of new revenue sources and ecosystems.
Digital transformation is a journey with multiple connected intermediary goals, in the end striving towards continuous optimization across processes, divisions and the business ecosystem of a hyper-connected age where building the right bridges in function of that journey is key to succeed. Digital transformation aims to create the capabilities of fully leveraging the possibilities and opportunities of new technologies and their impact faster, better and in more innovative way in the future.
Digital transformation in the integrated and connected sense which it requires can, among, others, touch upon the transformation of:
Business activities/functions: marketing, operations, human resources, administration, customer service, etc.
Business processes: one or more connected operations, activities and sets to achieve a specific business goal, whereby business process management, business process optimization and business process automation come into the picture. Business process optimization is essential in digital transformation strategies and in some industries and cases is essentially customer-facing today, whereas in others internal goals come first in initial stages.
Business models: how businesses function, from the go-to-market approach and value proposition to the ways it seeks to make money and effectively transforms its core business, tapping into novel revenue sources and approaches, sometimes even dropping the traditional core business after a while.
Business ecosystems: the networks of partners and stakeholders, as well as contextual factors affecting the business such as regulatory or economic priorities and evolutions. New ecosystems are built between companies with various background upon the fabric of digital transformation, information, whereby data and actionable intelligence become innovation assets.
Business asset management: whereby the focus lies on traditional assets but, increasingly, on less ‘tangible’ assets such as information and customers (enhancing customer experience is a leading goal of many digital transformaton “projects” and information is the lifeblood of business, technological evolutions and of any human relationship). Both customers and information need to be treated as real assets in all perspectives.
Organizational culture, whereby there is a clear customer-centric, agile and hyper-aware goal which is achieved by acquiring core competencies across the board in areas such as digital maturity, leadership, knowledge worker silos and so forth.
Ecosystem and partnership models, with among others a rise of co-opetive, collaborative, co-creating and, last but not lost, entirely new business ecosystem approaches, leading to new business models and revenue sources.
Customer, worker and partner approaches. Digital transformation puts people and strategy before technology. The changing behavior, expectations and needs of any stakeholder are crucial. This is expressed in many change subprojects whereby customer-centricity, user experience, worker empowerment, new workplace models, changing channel partner dynamics etc. (can) all come in the picture. It’s important to note that digital technologies never are the sole answer to tackle any of these human aspects, from worker satisfaction to customer experience enhancement. People involve, respect and empower other people in the first place, technology is an additional enabler and part of the equation of choice and fundamental needs.