The digital eco-system has altered how people and businesses interact. There is unprecedented disruption, with new organizations emerging and challenging established players across industries.
We wouldn’t be surprised with this given the pace of digital transformation taking place. It’s therefore naturally a key concern for every organization today.
What should be done and how should it be done to avoid getting disrupted is therefore the key priority in every organization. It’s forcing every organization to understand and invest in Digital Transformation, whether to digitize operations, enhance customer experience, or integrate digital into the physical channels.
Every enterprise must do these three things well in order to lead the digital transformation.
- Treat Digital as a Strategic Imperative
Digital transformation is a continuous journey and not a single product or technology implementation. It’s important for every organization to understand that. It’s not for instance, about moving from traditional channels to e-commerce to sell your products online. Nor is it about creating compelling digital marketing campaigns to attract customers. These are nothing but, isolated, quick-fix efforts for short-term gains. There’s no central digital transformation strategy that they bind to.
- Build the Digital Roadmap
Digital transformation is inevitable and irrespective of where you are on the journey, it’s essential to build a roadmap with set milestones. Otherwise, it would always appear as a mammoth task.
Those industries who’re already ahead on their transformation journey, e.g. banks, retail, travel and logistics, etc. digital has already become their core. For such industries, the next step is to spread digital competency across their entire value chain by identifying the critical areas for their business, e.g. is it to transform customer experience, do factory automation, or improve decision making, etc.
There are also some industries who’re yet to take the baby steps toward digital transformation. For them, the biggest struggle is where to start, so the best bet for them would be to learn from what others have already done, identify the low hanging fruits to tap, while focusing on building a strategic roadmap.
- Understand the Key Requirements to go Digital
No business will be able to survive without re-inventing itself. They have to become ‘the disruptors’ to avoid become ‘the disrupted’.
A key requirement to disrupt is bring business agility, which unfortunately is not happening because most organizations today are struggling with their business models and questions on where to begin and how to do it.
There’s a dire need therefore to re-define business models, technology stacks, and business applications, to bring agility that can facilitate digital transformation. Modernization must happen for both, business and the underlying technology architecture.
Moreover, it must all happen in parallel.
Key Questions to Ask
- Strategy & Operations:
- What to do in Digital Transformation and how?
- How will digital transformation affect the way we do business?
- What is the role of Digital Transformation and what is the path to improve?
- Solution Specific:
- How to enhance & derive value by adding cognitive extensions & industry specific functionality to our applications?
- How to derive insight across the value chain: Data Ingestion, Optimization & Decision Support?
- How to become agile in technology through a mix of technology deployment options?
Webinar Partner
Anil Chopra
VP-Research and Consulting, CyberMedia Research
Dharanibalan Gurunathan
Director, Cloud Technical Sales & Solutioning (Asia Pacific) , IBM