Digital Transformation affects every aspect of a business. It changes how you operate, what you offer, how you move forward as a company and how you deliver value to your customer. High stakes for sure! Before implementing a change as profound as this, it is understandable that you will have questions.
As a DT (Digital Transformation) Implementation Partner, Suyati works with businesses in rebuilding customer experience (CX) for the digital consumer as well bringing about operational excellence (OX) within businesses. As part of our process, we believe in answering the tough questions so clients are assured that Digital Transformation is the way to go for their company. With this in mind, I have compiled a list of the Top 5 questions that we are asked by our potential clients.
1) What does Digitization, Digitalization, and Digital Transformation mean?
Any conversation about digital transformation inevitably includes the three “digit…s.” This could create a measure of confusion especially since these terms are often used interchangeably. Understanding these terms will show you that they aren’t synonymous at all.
Let’s start with Digitization. Digitization simply means converting non-digital to digital (bits and bytes). This includes documents, images, photographs, audio etc. The goal is to transform them into digital data so they can be used by a computing system.
The definition of Digitalization and its difference from digitization is clearly brought out in the article, Moving from digitization to digitalization: “digitalization means the use of digital technologies and of data (digitized and natively digital) in order to create revenue, improve business (not just processes) and create a digital culture whereby digital information is at the core.”
Now Digital Transformation goes one step further. It involves a complete transformation of the business, its processes, the culture, and sometimes leads to a completely different market, customer base and more. While digitalization can be carried out on separate processes, digital transformation encompasses the whole enterprise and involves cross-cutting organizational change.
One of my recent blogs discusses these terms in detail: All Things Digital: Digitization, Digitalization And Digital Transformation Explained
2) How do we get started on the Digital Transformation Process?
Suyati works on a three-phase approach to transforming businesses to “digital-first.”
Phase 1 – DEMONSTRATE and secure adoption: In this first phase, we identify high-impact opportunities in your business processes that require low-effort. This helps you get immediate results and see the potential of the digital transformation process. This also helps in convincing the management the value of a Digital Transformation journey.
Phase 2 – SCALE and align with digital times: In this phase, we identify organizational priorities, seek out key business challenges to overcome and kick-off the building of a connected ecosystem of applications across the organization. This is best implemented using an agile approach with frequent review points with the sponsors to ensure that organizational priorities are addressed in the order that is best for the organization. Some may focus on Customer facing processes while others may prefer operational efficiencies. Using accelerators like Suyati’s Mekanate platform can help speed up the scaling process.
Phase 3 -TRANSFORM and beat competition: Domain experts along with data scientists will then continue to look at the competitive landscape and provide insights on your organization’s strength that can set you apart. These insights can drive continues improvements in CX and OX and directly influence topline and profitability.
For specific timelines and details, click here.
3) How can Digital Transformation deliver immediate value?
Although the Digital Transformation is a continuous activity your organization can see value immediately through minimal and incremental investments on top of the investments you are already making on your IT systems, applications and infrastructure. ROI factors and dollars may be defined prior to any efforts. For example, as part of Phase 1 of our three-phase approach, we begin implementation by identifying opportunities that deliver the highest benefit versus effort ratio.
This helps in gaining a clear understanding of the “low hanging fruit,” which are the areas where implementation of DT will have the most impact in the shortest time. Prioritizing processes in this manner and implementing lean principles will start yielding immediate results while the complete transformation is underway.
4) What kind of a framework can support Digital Transformation efforts?
Important features required by a framework that can support effective Digital Transformation include its ability to support rapid and low-cost change, work with advanced IT tools across the enterprise, derive actionable insights from digitized data and use these insights to automate processes and make intelligent decisions.
Mekanate is such a “loosely coupled” framework that leverages machine learning and AI-driven analytics engine to recommend actionable insights. The platform allows for easy communication between enterprise systems and the analytics engine while providing for custom integrations and extendibility. You can have a look at some of the features of this robust platform here.
5) Can Digital Transformation run parallel across functions?
Yes. An important feature of Digital Transformation is that it involves the whole enterprise. Cross-functional collaboration is one of its most advocated requirements. It stands to reason therefore that the transformation will be happening across your enterprise and across functions. With regards to capability, a “loosely coupled” framework with a robust architecture like Mekanate makes the process that much easier.
While these are the top questions we are asked, we are sure you may have more. My team and I would be happy to answer them. Drop in a message here or head on over to our website.
