Why Digital Transformation? Why Now?
Having worked in technology for 15 years, I’ve seen companies face a wide range of technological challenges across a variety of different industries, both B2B and B2C. However, none as big as what’s about to happen. The scary thing is, many companies don’t know it yet.
In an exclusive interview with McKinsey, Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, dropped a few poignant bombshells regarding the new digital era.
Chambers noted (paraphrasing), ‘Companies have been doing the same thing, year after year, for too long. Cut costs by 2%. Increase revenues by a few points. This is not going to work anymore. Companies now have to face the fact. Disrupt and innovate, or be disrupted,’ Chambers concluded.
Think your organization is immune to rapid Digital Transformation? Think again. Look at what’s happening to the mighty Intel. Known around the world as one of the most innovative, fastest-moving, and market-opportunity-seizing companies of all time, formerly led by one of the greatest CEO’s ever, the late Andrew Grove, Intel is cutting 12,000 jobs (about 11% of its workforce). Why? They were disrupted by fast-paced consumer adoption of new technologies.
The business impact of Digital Transformation is real and here to stay. Organization size doesn’t matter. You could be hundreds, thousands, or a hundred thousand. If you don’t have a plan to transform starting now, refer back to what’s happening at Intel right now. You’ll see more of this happening in every industry.
How Can Your Organization Respond to This Call?
Forrester research postulates, “Digital business transformation is a multi-year, multidimensional challenge. Traditional wisdom encourages firms to approach such a wholesale change as a big-bang transformation program, but the reality is that too many of these large-scale change programs fail. Digital business executives must champion a new tactic — one that delivers an adaptable, iterative approach to transformational change that can flex to accommodate the ever-moving customer and competitive landscape.”
And as Forrester includes in a forward to their 2016 Digital Transformation conference:
- Your customers are adopting new product experiences more rapidly than ever before — what Forrester calls “hyperadoption.” These hyper-demanding customers require immediate satisfaction, relentless innovation, and rapid iteration.
- Today, many organizations are in the midst of this critical pivot — deploying new tools and systems to align with opportunities created by digital technologies and to meet the demands of digitally empowered customers. But many are also discovering that successful digital transformation is challenging. It’s not just a technology issue.
- True digital transformation requires more: a top- to-bottom reinvention of the organization and a thorough-going upheaval of core business assumptions and even longstanding business models.
What Must You Consider?
As Forrester noted, Digital Transformation is about much more than technology. It requires a systematic change through company leadership to address all the following:
My company, Stuzo, operates within Technology Innovation (shown above). We help companies operationalize digital transformation through digital product innovation.
What Does Digital Product Innovation Look Like?
For many companies, digital product innovation takes multiple forms:
- Interconnecting previously disparate systems, such as CRM, loyalty, rewards, payments, customer communication, predictive analytics, and marketing automation.
- Building simpler, more intuitive interfaces that remove friction from transactions and provide faster, more seamless experiences.
- Extending core services to meet the customer where the customer wants to do business, such as:
- in a mobile app
- in a responsive web application
- via an internet connected device (Internet of Things / IoT)
- through a voice interface (think: Alexa, Amazon’s Echo AI)
- through Facebook Messenger, via the new bot interface
- inside a virtual reality or augmented reality experience
- on a wearable device
- Rethinking go-to-market by building products that can go out to the customer, rather than having products the customer has to come to.
Many companies are now investigating and investing in new platforms that effectively unify disparate systems and are capable of delivering the right experience, to the right customer, at the right time, through the right channel. The right channel being: wherever the customer wants to have the experience.
In fact, Stuzo is building platforms of this nature for enterprise companies right now:
Where Can You Find More Resources?
Forrester publishes and maintains a guide to Digital Transformation and in addition, over 600 technology management and digital business leaders from the world’s top companies, such as WalMart, AT&T, J&J, IBM, Yum!, and many more, will show up at this year’s Digital Transformation event, run by Forrester.
Your Takeaway
Innovate or die. Transform or be forgotten. Meet the customer on their terms, or say goodbye to them. These are the headlines floating around the minds of organizations in 2016. And for good reason. These concerns aren’t going away anytime soon.
To find out more about how Stuzo can help your organization manage Digital Transformation, through Digital Product Innovation, Contact Us.