People Are the Secret to Digital Transformation: Data Fuels It
Adobe’s Jay Dettling, VP of Global Partners & Alliances Program, discusses how the customer journey begins with employees, as well as how data will fuel that transformation.
Digital transformation has become the defining challenge for business in the past decade. Put simply, it’s the process by which companies leverage digital technologies in everything they do—from product to sales to operations and marketing.
As technology continues to change the way people live their lives—both personally and professionally—businesses need to revamp how they operate and relate with internal and external stakeholders. This is a major undertaking and many companies continue to grapple with how to take their digital transformation beyond parity and build it into a true competitive advantage.
According to IDC, global spending on digital transformation efforts will reach a staggering $1.7 trillion by the end of this year—that’s about the same as the GDP for Canada in 2018, the 10 largest economy in the world—and digital transformation spending is up 42 percent from 2017. Yet, half of U.S. business leaders believe their companies are failing to implement digital transformation strategies and 22 percent think their digital transformation efforts are currently useless, according to a recent survey from Wipro Digital.
Too often, businesses leaders get fixated on the technology platform and data strategy they want to achieve first, giving less importance to the critical parallel steps of engaging employees inside the business and the customers who fuel it.
Although technology implementation is a vital part of the process, long gone are the days when firms can delegate their digital plan to a single department. Transformation requires every part of the business to participate.
This is especially true for any part of the business with customer-relevant roles, whether that’s sales, customer support, marketing, engineering, IT, or a dedicated digital team. Digital transformation is only a competitive advantage when it results in positive customer experiences. Creating them requires an innovative, productive culture of collaboration across business teams and a shared sense of responsibility for the customer journey.
One good way to ensure this is to assemble a dedicated customer experience team. Many parts of your business have direct and indirect contact with customers and need to be involved in the digital experience transformation process. It’s also true that these departments have their own day-to-day roles and responsibilities to manage, as well as established interests in the traditional way of doing things.
Creating a dedicated team accountable directly to leadership, responsible for the customer experience and focused on collaboration often results in faster implementation, greater cooperation, and higher satisfaction for new digital strategies.
Finding strong talent to manage transformation can sometimes hinder transformation efforts.
