The Hard Part of Digital Transformation Is Not Digital.
Digital transformation sounds like a siren. It is a very attractive concept and everybody falls in love at first look. As a consultant, we must embrace this concept and apply it to the reality that’s often a little bit different from what we read into books. As an entrepreneur, we need to listen to all the siren to find the right one that can elevate our business. Tha’s why digital transformation, digital innovation, and cloud transformation are concepts so dear to us.
Looking outside of our company window we will see a lot of friends coming to us to help in digital transformation. Cloud vendors, DXP solutions and thousand of tools are there to make transformation possible. Anyway, we need to fight the harder enemy. Ourself. Maybe not you, not the CEO, not the CIO and so on… but in every company, you will find somebody that didn’t embrace the change. Somebody that listens and says “Yes, you are right” bu then, back to his desk, come back doing things in the old way.
During my working bring progress to many companies and I helped IT to create processes and tools to implement digital transformation. What I learn from this is that the harder part of this process is not the digital one. You may have the best tool and the most performant source code into the universe, but in the end, you need to convince people and bring them on board. That’s the harder part: the transformation.
The question may seem easy for everybody, but it is not so much. Have you heard about digital transformation? And digital innovation? It is the same? Well, innovation and transformation are often used synonymously, but refers to two different things. Innovation is what you want to reach. Assuming that you didn’t have the innovation yet, you will start a process to transform your business to digital. That journey is the (digital) transformation to reach the (digital) innovation. Basically, technologies enable a transformation process that can improve the business by innovating it in many ways. That’s easy, but let’s go deeper into it.
MIT Sloan Management Review tells that digital transformation is supported by three pillars:
Who is the most important keyword for a company? Probably “Sell”. But to sell you need somebody that buys. That’s why nowadays most innovative companies put all the focus on the customer and try to improve the customer experience. Inside digital transformation, the customer experience is enriched by customer insight and a set of commodities enabled by the new technology. Just think of the experience of buying on Amazon or the customer journey for innovative e-shops.
