Digital Transformation is Business Transformation
Digital Transformation is everywhere. It’s easy to let the tail wag the dog, especially when you are in the face of disruption.
But great and meaningful change always goes back to strategy.
In fact, if you really think about it, a lot of digital disruption is rooted in simple strategies for creating and capturing value at the edge, shifting power to users and consumers, reducing friction, and driving extreme efficiencies as new customer segments are created, new markets are forged, and the market seeks the dominant design.
Fundamentally, Digital Business Transformation is the digitization of business. But as part of digitizing, you need to know WHY and WHAT you are digitizing before getting lost in the HOW of digitization.
To survive and thrive in the digital age, it helps to have a handle on how to think about the landscape and how to play the game.
In Digital Transformation Dr. Mark Baker shares how different consulting companies and business leaders are thinking about Digital Business Transformation.
Business Strategy for the Digital World
PwC is in the leadership quadrant because rather than focus on a digital strategy for the business world, they focus on a business strategy for the digital world. I can relate to this because I’m on a team where we put business before technology. This means fundamentally thinking about market trends, business drivers, business outcomes and investment objectives to shape the Digital Business Transformation approach.
"PwC Consulting, if you look at the Gartner reports, or if you look at the Forrester reports, you'd see that they'd been doing a lot of work in the space over the past few years and are positioned in the leader's quadrant. Some of the reasons for being in the leader's quadrant for PwC is because they've done something remarkably well and I really, really like the philosophy and that's why I joined PwC. It's because that they believe that, you know, we don't need the digital strategy. What we require is a business strategy for the digital world and it just makes so much sense.”
Customer Journeys are Changing—How Do I Engage with My Customers?
One way to keep your bearings in the Digital Age from a business leader standpoint is to remember that your customer is your North Star. A business exists to create a customer, as Peter Drucker puts it.
It’s easy to get lost in trying to implement multi-channel this, or API structure that, but those aren’t the real questions. According to PwC, the real questions to drive your Digital Transformation start with recognizing that your customers demand new ways of learning about , trying, exploring, adopting, and socializing your products and services now. So the real question is how do you connect and engage with your customers in relevant ways. Once you shift your focus to your customer and their journey, now you can align your technical capabilities to support your key decisions that directly address your customer’s pains, needs, and desired outcomes.
"So I think when we talk about PwC and their philosophy for digital, what they're really saying is a digital strategy perhaps is limiting the impact of digital in today's world. It's really a business strategy for the digital age and we do know that the digital age is here to stay for a considerable long time and it's not about saying, 'Hey, how do I have a multi-channel strategy or you know, how do I, you know, choose to go with an API structure?' These are not the questions that are really being asked.
The questions that are really being asked are...you know, 'Customer journeys are changing today because of what digital has done, and therefor, my acquisition or my retention, you know, frameworks, or the way I'm going to go out and engage with my customers, needs to change. So can you help me to manage this change?' So there's a difference between the two things to say, 'Here's a digital strategy,' 'Here's a multichannel strategy' while on the other hand you're saying, 'Hey, how do I actually...' The same questions, but asked for the digital age and I think there's great merit in that position. So that's all about PwC Consulting and their take on digital.'”
Digital is Greater than the Sum of All Parts
Digital Transformation cuts across the board and spans your business. A simple way to think of it is to think in terms of the impact on customer experience transformation, employee or workforce transformation, and operations transformation. Your customer experience transformation spans your value chain. Your value chain connects your customer to product or service, supported by your business capabilities, which in turn are supported by technical capabilities. And as you evolve your value chain to better support customers, you also change how your workforce interacts with customers, partners, and each other. And as you evolve your workforce, you evolve your operations, and you innovate as you find ways to do things better, faster, and cheaper.
As you can imagine, you can’t just look at one business function or one piece of the business. You need to take a whole business view to better understand how Digital has a ripple effect across the entire business, and how the sum of the digital change is more than the parts.
“So digital isn't a part of a division. Digital is greater than the sum of all parts. As we'll see as we progress, if change is inevitable, it's likely to be transformative and revolutionary rather than incremental and evolutionary in many cases, and there is likely to be disruption and resistance. That doesn't man that if it is planned ahead, like expert surgery, or a space mission, it can't be mitigated in such a way that no individual step is traumatic, and the appearance of an incremental, stepwise process is retained.”
Digital Transformation is here. You can run from it, or you can embrace it and re-imagine how you can lead your business in a mobile-first, cloud-first world.