Foundation for Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is the profound transformation of business and organizational activities, processes, competencies and models. There are benefits that appease the requirements of any management and meet the business need of, reducing costs, improving customer strategy, integrating operations, performing analytics, having customer centric focus and increased agility and innovation.

In many cases this is not perfected at once and there are many factors, such as the economy or the desirability of the products, organisation culture, lack of skilled workers and integration issues, that can affect a company's success. Therefore it is often advised that, no manager should view digital or any other technological innovation - as their sure salvation.

Digital is more than just a thing that one can buy and plug into the organization. It is multi-faceted and diffuse, and doesn’t just involve technology. Digital transformation is an ongoing process of changing the way one does business. It requires a foundation with skills, projects, infrastructure, and, often, clean IT systems. 

The foundation needs bridges to be built up between:

1. IT and Businesses

2. Businesses and Information / Processes

3. Actionable Intelligence

4. Human Acceptance

5. New Ecosystem

6. Technology

7. Technology and Innovation

8. Future Strategy

9. Intent and Achievement

10. Risk and Uncertainity

There is coming together of  people, machines, and business processes, with all of the messiness that entails. It also requires continuous monitoring and intervention, from the top, to ensure that both digital leaders and non-digital leaders are making good decisions about their transformation efforts.

There are three core capabilities that an organisation must develop down to successfully navigate the transformation, these are:

A. Hyperawareness

B. Informed decision making

C. Fast execution

It is important for an organisation to calibrate digital investment to the readiness of industry, by considering both customers and competitors. 

Amid the excitement and uncertainty of a new technological era, it can be very difficult to distinguish between investments one needs to make ahead of the market and investments that must be in sync with market readiness. With digital transformation there’s a lot of exploration and understanding to accomplish before the curve starts to take shape.

Here are two things one can already start doing as of right now:

I. Get any ‘digital’ expertise and culture out of its splendid isolation and let it penetrate the rest of the organization,

II. Look at where the leaks in the business are and where it’s clear that there is a need to remove or bridge legacy and necessity, among others in the technologies that are crucial to scale and move faster and better once the right strategy is in place.