Is your Digital Transformation enough — or are you already falling behind?

Strategy6

'Businesses go through transformation when they have failed to evolve', Howard King, Guardian.

'One third of the top 20 firms in any industry segment will be disrupted by new competitors within five years.' — IDC. The conclusion is stark: transform or perish.

You will find numerous definitions of Digital Transformation. What is clear is that the status quo is not an option. You should never consider yourself fully digitally transformed — even if 100 percent of your revenues already come from digital services and products.

Digital Transformation is a never-ending pursuit of:

  • Efficiency (for example adding AI to improve a process)
  • Improving Customer Experience (for example, using augmented reality)
  • Best Value to the Customer (for example, the optimal ratio of cost to convenience)
  • Innovation (for example, creating entirely new products such as 4D printing)

We deliberately use the term Business Transformation rather than Digital Transformation — because Digital Transformation implies a destination. There is none. Multiple organizations are now fully digitalized yet remain far from optimized.

Business Transformation Consulting

'There is no Digital Strategy anymore, just strategy in a Digital World'.

Business transformation is a never-ending pursuit of excellence from all stakeholders' standpoint, applied across every process in an organization. The deeper challenge, however, is relevance — even a fully optimized organization may have ceased to matter to its customers.

Taking the position that IT can and should lead transformation, there are three major areas to address:

  • Run IT — keep the lights on and ensure capacity to keep running
  • Optimize and Extend IT — deliver projects the business needs, whether extending existing capabilities or driving cost optimization
  • Innovate — systematically question relevance to customers, assess emerging technologies, and sometimes fundamentally redesign business processes or the nature of the business itself

We are innovators, we created an EA framework and accelerator (ITA&S-F) and a Hybrid EDW approach (ITA&S-H) to deliver greater value. We were early adopters of DB appliances, Hadoop, OLAP on Hadoop, governed data lakes, and real-time Lakehouses — which we have materialized in our GUM-RTDP platform. AI is going to be transformative — and the potential of Generative AI, augmented reality, digital twins, and blockchain could be equally significant. What becomes possible when you combine them?

But technology alone will not support a business transformation, it needs to be coupled with:

  • CEDM — providing the business concepts that underpin everything else
  • AI to optimize processes — which requires an organized map of all your business capabilities and processes
  • Digital platforms (including D&A platforms) where stakeholders interact with a great user experience
  • Crowd engagement for feedback loops, ideas, and even solutions
  • Enterprise Architecture for roadmaps and business capability maps aligned with business objectives
  • Data Governance to align Data Quality targets with business objectives
  • Digital Analytics to capture user behaviors and intent across web and mobile

This is precisely where we add value.