We use digital technologies to create new — or modify existing — business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. ...

Our team has extensive experience in Digital transformation projects of some large organisations. there are primarily 4 areas of digital transformation

Technology

From the Internet of Things, to blockchain, to data lakes, to artificial intelligence, the raw potential of emerging technologies is staggering. And while many of these are becoming easier to use, understanding how any particular technology contributes to transformational opportunity, adapting that technology to the specific needs of the business, and integrating it with existing systems is extremely complex. Complicating matters, most companies have enormous technical debt — embedded legacy technologies that are difficult to change. You can only resolve these issues with people who have technological depth and breadth, and the ability to work hand-in-hand with the business.

INSIGHT CENTER

• Data & Digital Transformation
  Best practices for putting data to work.

Challenging as these difficulties are, an even more critical issue is that many business people have lost faith in their IT department’s ability to drive major change, as many IT functions are primarily focused on “keeping the lights on.” Eventually, however, digital transformation must incorporate institutional IT, so rebuilding trust is essential. This means that technologists must provide, and demonstrate, business value with every technology innovation. Thus, leaders of the technology domain must be great communicators, and they must have the strategic sense to make technological choices that balance innovation and dealing with technical debt.

Data

The unfortunate reality is that at many companies today most data is not up to basic standards, and the rigors of transformation require much better data quality and analytics. Transformation almost certainly involves understanding new types of unstructured data (e.g., a driver-supplied picture of damage to a car), massive quantities of data external to your company, leveraging proprietary data, and integrating everything together, all while shedding enormous quantities of data that have never been (and never will be) used. Data presents an interesting paradox: Most companies know data is important and they know quality is bad, yet they waste enormous resources by failing to put the proper roles and responsibilities in place. They often blame their IT functions for all these failures.

As with technology, you need talent with both great breadth and depth in data. Even more important is the ability to convince large numbers of people at the front lines of organizations to take on new roles as data customers and data creators. This means thinking through and communicating the data they need now and the data they’ll need after transformation. It also means helping front-line workers to improve their own work processes and tasks such that they create data correctly.

Process

Transformation requires an end-to-end mindset, a rethinking of ways to meet customer needs, seamless connection of work activities, and the ability to manage across silos going forward. A process orientation is a natural fit with these needs. But many have found process management — horizontally, across silos, and focused on customers — difficult to reconcile with traditional hierarchical thinking. As a result, this powerful concept has languished. Without it, transformation is reduced to a series of incremental improvements — important and helpful, but not truly transformative.

In building talent in this domain look for the ability to “herd cats” — aligning silos in the direction of the customer to improve existing processes and design new ones, and a strategic sense to know when incremental process improvement is sufficient and when radical process reengineering is necessary.

Organizational Change Capability

In this domain we include leadership, teamwork, courage, emotional intelligence, and other elements of change management. Fortunately, much has been written about this domain for many years, so we won’t review it here, other than to note that anyone responsible for digital transformation must be well-versed in the area. While, we have no firm evidence to support this, it seems that those who gravitate toward technology, data, and process are somewhat less likely to embrace the human side of change. Of course, in our recommendations above, we have urged leaders to seek those with excellent people skills. If you are unable to find them, a good alternative is to put some “purple people,” those able to work on both sides, on the transformation team.