A Blueprint for Digital Transformation

makenzy recently published a good article titled speed and scale unlocking digital value in customer journeys my intent is to enhance the content and to provide a one page blueprint for effective and scalable digital transformation let's use an information centric legacy company such as a travel agency financial or insurance company as our example such a company has many internal elements such as people processes data applications organization and culture and external elements such as suppliers vendors and governments that interact with one another to provide value to the customer until the last few years the external pace of change has been slow and therefore the elements that make up the company did not have to change that fast now the environment is much different today the customer may be interacting with the company through multiple channels such as online and through agents they're looking for simple and seamless ways to interact with the company for example when a customer uses a music download service he expects to search by download and listen to the song of his choice within a few seconds if this interaction becomes painful he will quickly move on to other companies that offer a better experience customer journeys are the mechanisms through which companies interact with their customers for effective business transformation we need to focus on such journeys while at the same time take into account the whole ecosystem of interacting elements that make the journeys possible when designing the digital feature but it will be very difficult to take all journeys into account for digital transformation the best option is to first select a subset of such journeys as a starting point which of those journeys to pick depends on the importance of that journey to the customer experience and may be based on criteria such as high volume or high impact more importantly they have to align with the digital vision of the company once a small set of journeys are picked they have to be modeled so that they can be reimagined and digitized we should not attempt to simply digitize an existing journey but rather look at how the journey can be improved for example you may want to reduce the number of steps each step in the journey may focus on certain attributes branding may be important in one step while speed may be important in another each step in the journey is essentially enabled by modular business services that can be reused in multiple places in this example of a customer purchasing insurance one step requires the customer to digitally sign the acceptance such a business service can be reused in multiple places across multiple journeys this means that foundational architecture has to be built in a modular fashion so it can be reused as we design and deploy more and more of these journeys the library of such reusable business services will continue to grow as the environment changes the business services will be updated to meet the new requirements of the ecosystem with time signatures may be replaced by retinal scans and updating the single business service can ensure automatic propagation to all the places that use to use a signature x' such modularity flexibility and reconfigurability allow the organization to continue to adapt to the ever-changing business environment these business services are in turn supported by applications and technology infrastructure that have to be integrated however by isolating technology in terms of business services they provide it is possible to switch out certain modules of technology gradually instead of completely revamping the whole infrastructure while all this is reality we need architecture models to represent the reality so it's easier for us to understand and manipulate that reality the architecture represents different types of entities such as people processes technology applications data except and the relationships between these entities changes to the reality can be communicated through changes in the architecture the architecture in turn has to be governed changes budgeted for and planned the overall plan for digital transformation includes other aspects such as change management talent management and a mechanism for continuous adaptation change management permeates the entire organization to enable mind shift in the culture current expertise and skills of people have to be upgraded to meet the digital needs of the organization one of the most effective ways to help employees increase their digital knowledge is to team them up in work cells which include a cross-section of people from different areas to collaborate as new techniques and approaches are available they are fed into the teams so they can continue to mature the transformation journey never ends continuing to evolve and adapt to the changing business and customer needs as the transformation rolls out the metrics and key indicators that used to be relevant in the legacy context are not necessarily relevant anymore new metrics have to be developed and monitored to provide a real-time dashboard for leaders to make decisions and fine-tune the organization all the influences of the ecosystem on the business is considered and the cycle starts all over again this blueprint is not comprehensive and is intended to just give an idea of the things that have to be considered in a digital transformation effort each of these steps can further be expanded into multiple levels of detail for an efficient execution and more elements can be added to this blueprint depending on your needs you

Channel: Raj Ramesh

Views: 152,542

Rating: 4.9143181 out of 5

Keywords: strategy & transformation, digital transformation, architecture

Id: zi0OaLMWYRA

Length: 6min 24sec (384 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2016