Here’s a very popular topic when digital practitioners or executives meet : what are the best examples of businesses having achieved their Digital Transformation ? What are the most advanced ones ? Everyone has his own examples, with the biases caused by his own expertise and concerns : some will focus on the sacrosanct customer experience and won’t pay attention to anything else, others will focus on cultural transformation or process transformation etc. There are lots of studies trying to provide an answer to this question, with the same biases. A more or less comprehensive set of criteria, a questionable weighting of some criteria ect. In the end there are lots of discussions about the real state of achievement regarding any mentioned business.
So back to the starting line.
To start, we should first agree on what Digital Transformation means. There are two approaches : digitization and digital transformation.
By digitization I mean digitizing the existing. Moving from brick and mortar to web. Moving one’s customer service online. Making a app to broadcast one’s media or sell products. Turning a paper based process into a paper-free one. Nothing changes fundamentally, it’s just about adding new channels and touchpoints.
Then there’s the transformation. As its name suggests, it’s about transforming the existing. I’ll use the Gartner’s definition : “the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunitiesâ€. Like any definition this one is not perfect but it clearly show the difference with digitization.
So when a retailer opens an ecommerce site it’s “just” digitization, no matter the effort it takes. Going fully omnichannel is more transformative because it has a real impact on the organization and the business, changing the business model to a freemium or subscription-based one, leveraging differenciating assets to tackle a new sector through technology is real transformation.
On the other hand there things one must be aware of. A business trying to assess how digitally advanced it is will look at other businesses according to its own needs and will overweight some criteria. A retailer will pay very little attention to a business excelling at Industry 4.0 and will even think it did nothing regarding digital even if the benefits are huge. It’s only because they don’t face the same challenges and that their business is different. There are also businesses that had nothing to do regarding some fields because they were already advanced and had little transformation to drive. Defining a comprehensive list of criteria is one thing but what matter is to weight each one properly regarding one’s challenge.
However there is a pitfall to avoid : focusing on businesses close to yours because they do the same things, face the same challenges, are on the same markets. There are two reasons to that. The first is there are always ideas worth stealing in industries that have nothing to do with yours. That’s one of the easiest ways to innovate on one’s market. The second is that many businesses beliefs that some issues are industry-related while everyone should care about them.
