4 Steps to be Successful with the Digital Transformation of Your Business

According to McKinsey, data-driven organisations are 23x more likely to acquire customers, 6x more likely to retain customers and 19x more likely to be profitable. Being data-driven is good for business. Therefore, it is not a surprise that one question I always get when advising organisations is how to digitally transform your business and remain relevant in these fast-changing times.

My first answer is to tell them that they have to achieve a gestalt shift, where they see their organisation from a different perspective. Instead of looking at your organisation from a product standpoint, you should see your organisation as a data organisation. This shift in perspective will fundamentally change how you run your organisation, as all of a sudden it opens new doors.

If your organisation wants to succeed in becoming a data organisation, the first step is having infinite streams of complete, high-quality, well-cleansed, unbiased data that is collected at every process and customer touchpoint within your organisation. The second step of transforming your organisation into a data organisation is to distribute that data, thereby facilitating new ways of collaboration with industry partners using distributed ledger technologies and making the data available to all your employees regardless of their location using public/private/hybrid cloud solutions. Not all problems require a blockchain solution, but to enable seamless collaboration, data needs to be available in the cloud.

Once company-owned data has been made easily accessible and exchangeable with internal and external stakeholders, it allows for more efficiency, transparency, security and privacy across every step in the value chain. Of course, in the near future, this will require a different approach as within the next decade, ownership of data will be returned to consumers.

The third step in digitally transforming your business is to analyse the available data for insights, patterns and anomalies using descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics. This will provide you with insights into your environment and the context to improve your decision-making. The final step will be to automate your internal processes and your decision-making. Smart algorithms will enable automation, but it is key that you have developed the right governance practices to ensure responsible AI. This leads us to the secret sauce to the digital transformation of your organisation:

This D2 + A2 model consists of several actions, stakeholders and required technologies that will help you prepare your organisation for tomorrow. Let’s discuss each step in the D2 + A2 model to explain why it is important, how you can approach it and what technologies will enable it: 

Digitally transforming your organisation requires data above all. To achieve that, the first step is to datafy your organisation. Datafication is the process of making a business data-driven, by transforming social action into quantified data. It involves collecting (new) data from various sources and processes using IoT devices or creating detailed customer profiles. Datafying your organisation starts by making your office, your workplace, your processes and your products smart. It will make previously ‘invisible’ processes traceable so that they can be monitored, analysed and optimised.

Thanks to the lowering costs of sensors, increasing low-cost bandwidth, cheap availability of cloud-computing and processing capacity as well as numerous connected devices it has become easier and cheaper to make these processes smart. It will enable you to capture data consistently and universally across different processes, products and workplaces.

Next to previously offline customer touchpoints, of course, you can also collect data at the online customer touchpoints, such as social media interactions. The data can then be used to create insights using analytics or enable actions using smart contracts.