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Plan your business-focused digital transformation and drive value by expanding your solution

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Many articles in the Dynamics 365 guidance content talk about how to start, implement, and deploy a project using Success by Design. Success by Design is a framework that helps you design and deliver successful business applications. But Success by Design isn't only about launching a project or achieving operational excellence. It's also about creating the right foundation for your organization to evolve your business applications and expand your digital transformation.

A project with Dynamics 365 doesn't always qualify as a digital transformation that aligns with your business goals. Sometimes, you might migrate your systems to the cloud as part of infrastructure modernization or to ensure supportability. That might be the first step toward digital transformation, but you can do more to deliver value to your business. Instead of treating it as just an upgrade that's run by the IT team, you can look for opportunities to involve the business and transform your processes.

This article focuses on how to plan a business-focused digital transformation and how to expand your solution to drive more value. You'll learn how to:

  • Map your current business model
  • Identify the factors that affect your business model
  • Review how they can trigger transformation
  • Define your goals and scope of business processes for a transformation roadmap

Map your current business model

Before you define a digital transformation roadmap, you need to understand your business model. Your business model shows how you create and deliver value to your customers and how you generate revenue. You need to know who your customers are, what they need, and how you meet their needs. You also need to know the key activities and resources involved in your business.

You can use different techniques or frameworks to describe your business model and how you create value. One framework that we'll use as an example is the Business Model Canvas, developed by Alexander Osterwalder. It's a simple, holistic, and easy-to-understand way to represent your business model. You can use it to map your existing business model and to highlight what aspects of your business model are changing. Then you can align your digital transformation strategy to these changes.

The business model shows the "why" of your business and what it takes to deliver value to your customers. The "how" is the business process definition, which we'll cover later.

Identify the triggers for change

Your business model can be disrupted or influenced by various factors, both internal and external. These factors create opportunities for transformation. In a world that's changing faster than ever, you need to adapt your business to meet new customer expectations, improve customer experiences, and attract and retain talent. The opportunities for impact are plentiful. For a deeper discussion, read the introduction to the implementation guide.

Here are some examples of how factors can trigger changes to your business processes and applications.

  • Changes in customer segment

Your products and services might appeal to different customer groups or demographics over time. You need to tailor your messaging and channels to reach and resonate with your potential customers. Do your marketing automation and customer data platform support this development?

  • New channels

The channels that you use to deliver your products and services might change. For example, customers might expect remote delivery of services via digital channels instead of visiting a physical store. This expectation grew during the COVID-19 pandemic. How does this change affect your order management systems or related business processes?

  • Changes in value proposition

You might come up with unique value propositions to differentiate yourself from your competitors in a crowded market. For example, you might offer a subscription model to drive recurring revenue and shareholder value. Some customers prefer subscriptions over ownership. The automobile industry offers cars on a subscription basis and charges based on miles driven, instead of selling cars outright. How do your processes and business applications support this change in business model?

  • Changes in customer relationships

Your approach to engaging with customers might evolve with your business. For example, you might shift from acquiring new customers to retaining and upselling existing customers after you gain a fair market share. How does your customer engagement strategy change, and what does it mean for your system?

  • Changes in revenue streams

You might create new revenue streams as your business grows. For example, an energy provider in a competitive market might offer home services to increase its income. This change affects its customer processes and related business applications. Do you know how your revenue streams affect your business applications?

  • Resources and sustainability

More organizations are committed to environmental sustainability. How do you track your carbon footprint, emissions, and procurement from sustainable sources in your manufacturing and operations?

  • Custom manufacturing

With the advances in 3D printing technology, you might offer custom, made-to-order options to your customers. How does this affect your operations processes and enterprise resource planning (ERP) application?

  • Partnerships and acquisitions

You might grow your business through acquisitions or strategic partnerships with other organizations that have complementary services. How do these changes affect your process alignment and your supporting business applications?

  • Cost and efficiency

New technologies might offer efficiency advantages that can reduce your operational costs. For example, delivery companies use electronic signatures instead of paper-based solutions to get real-time notifications and provide new value to customers. Are there opportunities to improve your process efficiency using the latest technology?

  • External factors

Changes in the socioeconomic situation, political climate, and regulations can affect how you do business. How do new and changing regulations affect your business?

You can use the Business Model Canvas to highlight what aspects of your business model are changing and to align your digital transformation strategy to these changes. This way, your business can adapt and grow.

Define your digital transformation goals

Factors that disrupt your business model can kickstart your digital transformation. You need to define your transformation goals in business terms, with measurable metrics that you can track over time. These goals might involve several milestones and phases.

Let's look at an example. Your goal is to create a 360-degree view of your customer. You want to see things like their activity history, product purchases, and subscriptions. But this goal doesn't relate to a business outcome or a measurable key performance indicator (KPI). A measurable goal for your digital transformation could be to increase upsell to existing customers by X percent, or to reduce the time to address customer queries by Y percent. To achieve this goal, you need a 360-degree view of the customer.

Although most programs start with a set of business goals, it's important to communicate and remind these goals to the IT and technical teams that implement the solutions. In long-running transformation programs that involve several technologies, teams and partners might lose sight of the actual business goals and focus too much on the technology.

You can use objectives and key results (OKR) as a goal-setting framework for your digital transformation. OKR helps you align your objectives with measurable results and track your progress.

Prioritize your business processes

The next stage of the process is discovery, which involves key business stakeholders. With a clear view of your changing business model and transformation goals, you can identify the related business processes and applications that need to change. The discovery exercise should focus on creating clarity around how the business processes and applications need to evolve to meet the transformation goals.

The scope of change might include automating a manual activity to improve productivity, capturing data accurately to improve the effectiveness of strategy, driving user efficiency, or eliminating data siloes to generate insights about your customers.

You should prioritize the changes to maximize and deliver measurable business value continuously, without having to wait for a multi-year transformation program to complete. You should keep the digital transformation in the foreground, with engagement from the business, users, and executive sponsors. Business agility should be the key focus for long-running, comprehensive transformation, or you risk missing business opportunities and losing market share.

Learn more at Process-focused solution.

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