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View Points

The Three Key Elements for Success Digital Transformation

The evolution of new technologies and analytics is fundamentally changing how companies conduct their business, we help our clients to adoption these technologies to deliver real business benefits.

We do this be not just understanding the technologies, but also ensuring this enables real changes in the client Management Systems and the building of new capabilities only then can companies harness the real business benefits. 

 

The first decision a company must take is what are we trying to address, or what is the problem we are trying to solve through digital? Are we seeking to radically transform our business through defining new business models and disrupting the Industry or are we seeking to identify focused "point solutions" to address specific productivity issues? Having clarity on the scope of what we are trying to achieve sets the boundaries and the scale of the transformation we are seeking to achieve.

 

A second point and a key foundation of the digital transformation is a significant "mindset change" how we think about technology and "systems".

 

In the past major technology projects have usually been associated with large scale ERP implementations such as SAP or Oracle, these were seen as multi-year projects and incorporating a "corporate wide" global best practice, often overlooking or in worst cases overriding local good practices or even local requirements.

In a digital environment we are seeking to create a "start-up" mentality where employees are encouraged to identify potential improvements that can be realised through applying digital technologies.

 

Using a structured method they are encouraged to experiment to identify customer (both internal and external) pain points and how could digital technologies be applied to eliminate and thus delivering vastly improvement customer experiences, cost reductions and productivity gains.

 

It is this mindset change from pre-packaged, built-in good practice systems, to an and customer experiences, cost reductions improvement using a structured method they are encouraged to experiment to identify customer (both internal and external) pain points and how could digital technologies be applied to eliminate and thus delivering vastly entrepenurial experimentation, a start-up mentality that drives innovation and new ideas.

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The key foundation of the digital transformation is a significant "mindset change" how we think about technology and "systems"

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Unless companies are prepared to accept this mindset change only then will they potentially reap the full benefits of digital transformation.

" The 3 main elements to delivering real-business benefit through digitalization are Technology, People & Management System"

Once a company has defined the problem we are trying to address and accepted mindset change,  we believe there are core elements to delivering successful real change and business benefits and that without one of the elements the program is in danger of failing to deliver the full business benefits. These elements are :

 

Technology solution, this is means not just the software but should also address the overall architecture and the support from the existing IT departments, in many cases we see clients are embracing cloud based solutions since this offer opportunity to"pay as you go" which releases companies from large software expeditures, using cloud based allows clients to increase experimentation with new ideas safe with the knowledge that if the experiment fails to deliver then it can simplying be modifed or even turned off with no significant cost impact.

 

People, today we see a range of new positions that a short time ago didn’t exist, such as data scientist, data engineer etc. As has been stated by many scholars that data is the "new oil" and the importance of data is driving organisations to reconsider the how they treat data within their organisation. 

 

We believe that it is critical to establish these new competencies with the client organisation as part of the digital journey. While some of these competencies can be outsourced to specialist providers, we believe that until an organisation really gets digital in its "DNA" then they are only scratching the surface of what may be possible.

However technical competencies alone don’t guarantee success these need to be supported by the adoption of an agile approach to solution develop, this involves and iterative approach to developing the technology solution, including engaging the key persona's in the business in the design using Design Thinking workshops, thus re-enforcing the concept of experimentation and continuous improvement.

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Management Systems, finally and most importantly unless companies change the way they do things then real benefits will not be achieved. In many cases the new insights, in the case of predictive maintenance modelling, and speed of information flows, such as real online image monitoring of road conditions, enables better and more rapid decision making however this often means changes to the way we do things and how we make decisions.

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Learning from our years of experience in Lean we believe that by adopting similar principles in a Digital Environment can yield significant business benefits, such as "swarming" the problem, rapid deployment of "squads" of people, bring the right people, with the right expertise at the same time to solve the problems. Again this breaking down of the silo mentality and in some cases restructuring of the organisation requires proactive Change Management to make the changes stick. 

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So, whether it be applying an Industry-specific "point" solution or building a digital transformation journey, we work closely with our clients to ensure that the technologies deliver real-business benefits.

We aim not to just help clients with the problems of today, but we also look to the trends and possibilities for the future

Please contact us for further discussion & more information

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