The recent 2019 CIO Agenda that looped in 3,100 CIOs of 89 countries, confirmed that “Digital business hinges on sound IT, combining new, disruptive technologies”. The reports also confirmed that a majority of tech investments would flow towards:
- Business Intelligence and Data Analytics45% of respondents confirmed increasing investments
- Cyber and Information Security45% of respondents confirmed increasing investments
- Cloud Services33% of respondents confirmed increasing investments
- Core System Improvements/Transformation31% respondents confirmed increasing investments
- Digital Business Initiatives31% of respondents confirmed increasing investments
- Customer/User Experience29% of respondents confirmed increasing investments
- Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning27% of respondents confirmed increasing investments
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)14% of respondents confirmed increasing investments
- Customer Relationship Management Solutions35% of respondents confirmed increasing investments
- Internet of Things2% of respondents confirmed increasing investments
In fact, I came across a very interesting piece that depicted stories of companies like – Kaiser Permanente, General Electronic (GE), John Deere, Dominos and the likes, who have embraced the data transformation strategies and going full swing with it.
GE the giant is believed to still be in the midst of a continuous digital transformation process. The company has integrated sensors into various wings such as aviation, transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, as well as in its energy production business. In addition to that, the company has also built a software to analyze the resulting data, the business reports of which stated that GE software and services business made about $6 billion in revenue (2016).
So, how exactly are these companies coping up, and if you are a business owner willing to take the leap, would you want digital transformation to help you in your business growth, or is it too much of a risk? Digital transformation a broad topic covering several initiatives, can become more like a question mark unless you are able to zero down on its specific work logic. There are two major facets of digital transformation, one – the consumer part and the other internal processing part.
Let me help you in looking into the two facets.
All About The Digital Trust (The Consumer Part)
As per a business insight published by McKinsey & Company, they have found that in this dynamic world of value creation and durable competitive advantage, being able to deliver digital services and operations has emerged as an instigator in re-shaping customer experience in every sector.
A good example of how that could be implemented in your business is by learning about the key offerings of digital transformation in boosting customer experience. After having been through a number of reports, and recent news I could zero down on four factors that majorly affect in delivering superior digital experiences, and taking the help of digital transformation is scaling customer’s trust:
- Designing and digitizing customer journeys
- Increasing speed and agility in insight generation
- Achieving customer adoption of digital customer journeys
- Developing agility in delivering journey transformations
Digital Transformation Strategy (Internal Processing Part)
Not so long ago in one of the MIT Sloan Management and Deloitte’s global study of digital business, that took place in the year 2015, it was noticed that the strength of digital technologies (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) did not lie in these technologies individually, instead stemmed-up from how companies open to digital transformation, integrated them to transform their businesses.
The result was based on the “tale of tables” example, wherein changing the size of the tables in an employee’s cafeteria increased the business productivity, and provided the scope of digital transformation in the business.
The story begins with a large online traveling company working with Humanyze, which is a people-analytics company with its headquarters in Boston. Humanyze analyzed the company’s human capital and found out that the people who were eating lunch together, during the chit-chat sessions were also sharing important insights, which in turn made them more productive. In addition to that, the analysis also showed that productivity further increased based on the number of people sitting on the same table.
Later, the integration of digital technologies pointed on several ways by which the table sizes could be increased, which had a direct and measurable impact on employee productivity.That is how digital analyses helped a company in strategizing a plan and improve its productivity.
However, for a company to grow technologically there are certain factors that play a key role like:
- Having digital savvy leaders
- Communicating frequently via traditional and digital methods
- Empowering the workforce to apply new ways of work, and more
Conclusion
As a Technology Leader myself, I can say that it is all about collecting quality data, and integrating it efficiently, that help in analyzing customer behavior, and assist in continuously improving and innovating digital journey.
On the internal processing front, upgrading an organization’s hard wiring helps in keeping up with the fast pace of the competitive business world, and that is where digital transformation comes in the picture.
