Digital Transformation – Technology acquisition or more than that?

Digital Transformation – Technology acquisition or more than that

Digital transformation is not just about technology acquisition. Many businesses over-emphasize technology and fail to consider the human factor, the employees, and the shock it may cause to them.

Digital transformation as needs to be understood is, a complete reassessment and overhaul of an organization’s information technology (IT) systems in order to improve the efficiency and delivery in a digital economy.

To start, any successful digital transformation is a combination of,
1. Vision
2. Acceptance and Alignment
3. Understanding the Current condition and To-Be – the Future of transformation
4. Planning and Investment

To put it in perspective, beyond the normal discussion, the broader goals are usually lost in:

1. Discussions about its constituent dimensions – digitization, e-enabling internal processes, document management, mobility, and collaboration among others
2. A listing of exciting business capabilities that could be, or have been achieved in other industries

We can look at three fundamental pillars that can span the entire organization and the complete value chain:

1. Collaborative – Unified consumer and stakeholder experience
2. Insightful – Building better decision-making capabilities to enable personalized experience and result-oriented outcomes
3. Futuristic & Innovative – by being the above two, companies should constantly focus on innovating

These fundamental pillars encapsulate customers (and segments) and stakeholders, channels, product portfolios, business functions, information orchestration, data and analytics, and innovations for the future, thus enabling a birds-eye view of the organization.

These pillars can work well once mapped against three capability stages:

Foundational – Set up for the transformation correctly by getting the basics right
Enable and Scale – Start achieving the business and technology priorities
Innovate – Stay updated with ease and lead with agility

Going back to the starting point, even as you build a vision and execute the roadmap, it is extremely important to have quick wins. These quick wins give you the ability to test waters and adapt to the boundaries as they should be. It is also extremely important to have a group of leaders who can collaborate and engage to bring down these boundaries and champion the change.

NAM has been involved in the entire value chain providing the right manpower who understand the challenges of Transformation at every stage, allowing them to be more realistic and adopt an agile approach to the demands of the businesses.