Five winning plays for digital transformation
Most organizations are in the midst of digital transformation projects that aim to keep the company competitive in an expanding digital market. However, the definition of a digital project varies from company to company, according to Khalid Kark, managing director of Deloitte LLP and director of research for Deloitte’s CIO Program.
It might mean enabling mobile and social capabilities, or getting the workforce to collaborate more, or focusing on customer engagement and experience, or developing and driving a new revenue source. So how can business and tech leaders choose the projects that will yield success?
“You have to look at your business context, and develop an approach that would allow you to drive quick value for your business,” said Kark. “It doesn’t matter what it is, but there needs to be an urgency around doing it. Go after the low-hanging fruit, build and establish credibility, then go for bigger, more innovative efforts to drive change.”
Here are five digital transformation projects with high chances of success.
Digital enablement involves setting the foundation for further digital transformation, by adding channels such as mobile, social, and cloud, said Hung LeHong, vice president and Gartner fellow, and member of the CEO and Digital Business Leaders research group.
“It’s more of a technology preparing the ground than actual business change,” LeHong said.
It seems that many organizations are preparing for digital enablement: the most popular digital measures that companies plan to implement in 2017 are moving systems to the cloud, shifting to online digital tools, using data analytics, and using social media, according to a recent Tech Pro Research study.
Part of this process should include building a cross-functional digital team, said Gianni Giacomelli, chief innovation officer at Genpact, and head of its Genpact Research Institute, which has studied digital transformation. “Your digital projects should cross organizational fault lines — business people, IT people, and front- and back-office people should be represented,” he said.
Evolving customer behaviors and preferences are the number-one catalyst driving organizational digital change, according to research from Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter.
“Many businesses are looking to customer experience to bring about organized change,” Solis said. “They learned customers are making decisions differently, and are much more mobile and instant, so the tech they’re investing in is to serve a particular need.”
For example, Sephora went through several customer-focused digital transformation projects, Solis said. The company studied how their customers make decisions, what technology they use and how it fits into their lives. It then created a new customer experience group to bring together employees across departments to develop new ways to reach their market, and revamped their infrastructure, apps, and kiosks. The company also opened an innovation center in San Francisco to test new technologies in a live environment to try and get ahead of the consumer.
“They learned how the physical aspects of customer interaction needed to change,” Solis said. “Every aspect — web to mobile to app to cloud — was done to create a unified customer experience for a higher and more advanced series of expectations.”
Research from Deloitte also found that 57 percent of CIOs ranked customers as the top business priority.
