Understand the Digital Transformation Challenge

In this article, we going to describe the top challenge that an organization has to think about to start approaching its digital transformation on the right foot. A framework by definition tends to give a frame by breaking down the requirement and giving an overview and context about the challenge.

There are four dimensions to consider:

1. Business Process Digitalization
2. Digital Disruption
3. Digital Innovation
4. Digital Culture

Business Process Digitalization

Business processes from the past are meant to be digitalized where technology will facilitate the recording and processing of those data. Therefore, it goes beyond a simple transition from offline to online. We expect to re-engineer those processes before and after implementing technology.

Re-engineering business processes was a concept originally started in the 1990s.

This is a cycle of continuous improvement that tends to reduce operational cost and improve customer satisfaction whether the experience is online or offline. Applying digital technology amplifies the value delivered and cost optimization. On the contrary applying, only technology alone will not produce the same results.

“It’s not changing what you do, it’s changing the way you do it”

Jean-Pascal Tricoire, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider Electric.

Digital Disruption

A digital disruptor exists only if there is a market to disrupt. That type of shift happens when a new player entering in a market and leverages digital technologies toward established competitors.

That phenomenon happens during the testing of a new product or service or a new distribution model resulting from an innovative go-to-market approach.

I noticed a significant increase of digital venture born all around the world, but not every industry has the same maturity level, today customer on Internet expect an Internet of Quality where quality increase over quantity. You could imagine a product that just keeps getting better.

For instance: a search engine is more relevant with more search requests made over time.

Some would argue that disruptors are famous for being outsiders, therefore it has not always been the case and there are many examples of rapid business innovation made by established players with the ability to execute a strategy and become a market leader.

“my real theory is and it’s what venture capital is all about; big transformation happens because the big companies don’t get it right and a startup comes in and run faster than anybody can and build a new industry”

Joe Schoendorf Partner, Accel Partners

Do you remember Kodak’s fallout during the shift from analog to digital camera tech? FujiFilm was not a startup but they understood how to transform:

More about the Kodak and FujiFilm shift

Digital Innovation

A digital innovation is a new service, product or process giving an unfair advantage by leveraging digital technology. Innovation can take place in an incremental or radical way.

You can reinvent a business model with innovation but let’s check what is a business model:

You can revisit the 7 dimensions of the value proposition:

1. Reduce client’s overall costs
2. Reduce clients’ hassles
3. Look for non-customers
4. Search other segments or industries
5. Introduce more functionality or more emotions
6. Modify the revenue stream
7. Anticipate trends

You can revisit the 7 dimensions of the value chain:

1. Introduce a technology
2. Modify one or several steps in the value chain
3. Eliminate or add a step in the value chain
4. Partner with competitors
5. Leverage strategic resources & competencies
6. Identify complementors
7. Find new resources

Applying digital innovation to business manage to create today those new digital disruptors where they come as platform as a business. According to Marc Cusumano in his book “The Business of Platforms” it has been noted than comparing to the pre digital age, those platforms tend to have:

• Similar sales as the previous players from the pre digital age.
• Twice less employees
• Twice more growth rates
• Almost twice more operating profits
• A market values almost 3 times bigger.

An Important fact: Today, over 60% of unicorns (startups valued over $1 billion) are also platform businesses.

They leveraged technology to build a collection of products or technologies that others can build upon or conduct transactions. They gather market sides (minimum of 2).

This triggers a self-reinforcing positive feedbacks loops, where the potential value for each user increases with each additional user or complement, we call it a network effect that change the growth potential from linear to exponential. It results in a more complex business models and more market dynamics.

Some historical examples of innovation with network effects: telephones, railroads, Internet, and marketplaces.

Key takeaways:

Not every market is “platformizable” but we can learn that building a product and opening to third partys bringing innovations allow to make what we call an innovation platform play.

Building a service and generating more value from connecting market sides instead of owning assets or producing a service directly allow to make a transaction platform play.

Those trying to have a hybrid approach where you distribute with a transaction (Apple Store) and where you innovate by adding complementors (Apple iOS) can make a winning platform overall.

Digital Culture

Digital culture is a concept misunderstood that explains that technology and the Internet significantly shape the way we interact, behave, think, and communicate as humans in society.

All those trends we hear about such as cyber security, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, the Internet and its derives like social engineering and modern psychology are part of the digital culture.

Using social media as a medium to spread a story, sharing a story on Instagram or a moment on WeChat, cashless payment; using emojis, and that addiction to notifications: its all about the relationship between humans and technology.

Humans will not be able to harness that computing power if their culture does not evolve as well.

Here is a list non exhaustive of topics regarding digital culture:

• Cloud Computing
• Digital advertising
• Digitizing cultural heritage
• Internet freedom and control
• Hacking
• Online politics and social movements
• Surveillance
• Social media
• The Sharing Economy
• Big data
• …

That very same digital culture will have an impact about how people going to team up to solve a problem in new ways. For a company, the challenge is about closing the gap between employees and leadership.

As the importance of having a digital culture is often overlooked by CXO’s, it’s a source for competitiveness as it gives a sense of purpose and empowers employees. Without it, it will be difficult to make significant progress on a digital transformation.

To reach its potential, organizations will have to set new norms by getting rid of old habits and embrace new way of doing things and communicate.

“The big moment for an organization is when they have embraced the fact that digital transformation isn’t a technical issue, but a cultural change.”

Ian Rogers, Ex Chief Experience Officer at Ledger, ex CIO at LVMH,

According to MIT Center for Information System research, those 7 areas are the root cause of lack of digital culture in an organization.

Agility and Flexibility: In other terms, the ability for the organization to move quickly and adapt in the decision-making process and not be outpaced by technology or demand changes.

Collaboration: Cross-functional team for skills sharing and its objective key metrics.

Customer centricity: The results of a well-executed customer engagement strategy where we reinvent ways to converse with the customer and enchant his journey based on the insights of any employees that can spot and raise an identified improvement.

Innovation: Behaviors igniting risk-taking, exploration and testing new thinking and ideas.

Data-driven Decision-Making: ability to organize and share a common business truth that helps to make better decisions between departments and cross-functional teams that benefits the company.

Open Culture: Teaming up with external entities such as 3rd party vendors, startups and or, customers.

Digital First Mindset: a mindset where digital is a reflex, a second nature.

But also, do not fantasize how about digital born enterprise do in terms of culture. Despite Uber’s growth when everyone was thinking that Uber is trendy and the term “uberisation” was in the mouth of everyone, I suggest having a look here with an interesting article by Fred Wilson from Union Squares Ventures that didn’t invest in Uber in 2017.

Getting Digital Leaders to Drive the Digital Culture

It’s especially difficult when there are no incentives for employees to act differently. To generate a movement, CEOs have to hire or build their digital leaders by empowering them.

Digital leaders align their incentives with the transformation digital strategy, their objectives are transformational, for others their objectives are already aligned in their job description paired with an incentive mechanism.

Culture change goes with aligning KPIs and incentives. Digital Leaders pay a great deal of attention to cultural evolution. They highlight what could work better and keep iterating on the rest.

They have a compelling vision about where they should go with their collaborators. It is a multi-year process that depends on the size and repartition of the organization.

The worst is when your Digital Leaders leave because they realized that the maturity of the organization reached a ceiling and it there isn’t any breakthrough anymore.

Some companies like to start with digital ambassadors where others established a special acceleration program (Nestle used to relocate special talents for a 8 month program before to send them back in their subsidiaries to broadcast digital skills among their brands portfolio).

“I really do believe that the future belongs to the fast, but you would be surprised how often people don’t do this; getting the right people, in the right job at the right time with the right attitude. And depending turnarounds, transformations are not for everybody. Do you actually have the people in the organization in the right job who can help you accomplish this? No amount of pressure from the top with the wrong people will bring you that.”

Meg Whitman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Increasing the Culture change starts by focusing on what prevents it. Studies over the years demonstrated that organizations hadn’t realized the scale of the challenge by not paying attention to:

• Breaking down organizational silos between tech and business
• Employee Engagement which is low
• Skills / Competency gap that remains.

Digital Framework

According the MIT Center for Information Systems Research, it is recommended for CEOs to aim for setting up their Operational Cornerstone (sometimes called backbone) through business process digitalization and to pick either Customer Engagement or Digitized Solutions as area of development.

4 Key Decisions for CEOs:

1 Define a grand vision: How you going to change your customer’s life?

2 Choose a strategic driver: Customer engagement or Digitized solutions?

3. Establish digital capabilities

4. Architect the business (Transition towards new business models and a new organization matrix)

Operational excellence starts with the basis of an information system well organized.

This is where an IT Department can shine. A seamless compliant integration is mandatory between your Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, and other systems to ensure the reliability, scalability, security, predictability, and quality of your operations.

It requires standardization and business rules well-defined (the most difficult) and it’s an absolute prerequisite to building the rest.

When your Customer Service, Logistics, and Supply Chain gain a substantial productivity you can bring more business to the pipe without disappointing new customers.

BBefore the digital economy it was important to have one. Today it’s impossible to play in the digital economy without it and on top of it: it’s not enough. Table stakes.

At the intersection of Customer Engagement and Digitized Solutions you can create digital offerings (redefining your value proposition) between what’s possible and what customer wants.

Customer Engagement or Digitized Solution?

Customer Engagement is the tools, avenues, and tactics used for ongoing communication with customers, across all touchpoints they have with your business. For marketers, this means reaching your target audience, offering compelling and valuable content, capturing their attention, and being on top of their minds at every stage of the customer journey.

It is multi-channel (email, social media, web, mobile), and requires collecting the right data that includes engagement metrics for marketing operations (email opens, interactions, visits, and clicks) but also transactional metrics (what, when, and where there is a purchase, and steps that led to the purchase).

Its market driven and is supposed to give a seamless, responsive, customizable and consistent customer experience as you understand who they are and what they really want. It tends to transform the Go to Market approach.

Digitized solutions are product-driven, discard what users need, and tend to transform business models.

They came from your digital innovation and can make a distinction between a market leader and followers. It can set a standard that all competitors have to follow.

But not everyone is Apple and decides without listening to their customers. That is also why this notion is still not yet understood as it has specifics depending on business models and industry so it’s a work in progress.

What we do know:

Digitized solution is a multi-year high risk, high rewards approach requiring a high level of:

• Digital maturity
• Ability to keep testing along the way with scaling the proper resources
• Agility for the established organization (Ex. no heavy procurement cycle for an IT agile team).

Nowadays it is recommended to set up a Digital Platform inside a company that acts as a base for rapidly build, reuse, and discard a new piece of a business (services/ microservices) and that can on top connects your organization to your ecosystem of partners. It behaves like a startup’s studio with several mini startups inside and it’s an agile organization.

It follows a set of principle for accountability and incredible coaching skills that is a paradigm for old hierarchy to genuinely set up accountabilities:

But the little information I found indicates that new revenues generated by companies testing digital offerings still represent a little fraction of their core business.

It takes time to learn how to think differently and execute effectively.

I believe that a company succeeding a complete digital transformation would be an organization that set up a digital platform inside an organization.

That team would fundamentally transform the organization incrementally or radically. Imagine a startup inside your organization that becomes the organization.

Fortunately, not a lot of use cases of established players in a given industry had reborn as platforms described in this article yet.