Introduction
Digital Transformation has become an aspirational buzzword whose meaning is dependent on your business, available budget, and immediate problem.
Digital transformation is not a quick fix, but must be done quickly to remain relevant.
Digital Transformation is a rallying cry for companies to adopt digital technology to improve efficiency, value, and ability to innovate. The objective is business efficiency and control, and digital transformation done properly will change the way people work, how information flows around an organisation, and how customers relate to the organisation.
To support Innovation, enterprise technology must be optimised for change. Solving today’s problems tomorrow is too late. Solving tomorrow’s problems today requires us to predict the future.
Immediate business benefits will depend on where you begin your digital transformation journey and your immediate objectives. Experience suggests that starting points capable of delivering immediate advantages are:
- Customer engagement
- Corporate efficiency
- Platforms and Controls
Innovation is so often snuffed out at the first hurdle – when the great idea cannot be implemented because of cost, risk, or complexity.
Digital Transformation is the adoption of digital technology to improve efficiency, value, or innovation. It changes the way people work, changes how information flows around an organisation, and changes how customers relate to the organisation.
Digital transformation is about configuring technology to deliver the functions and structure that can support and lead change in the enterprise. It does this by delivering a structure that reduces the cost, risk, and complexity of change.
1 – Customer Engagement
Customer expectation is ever changing and so are the devices and methods of engagement. The time available to respond to a new trend in devices, software or fashion is reducing. Customers want to engage at different times, and in ways that suit their unique needs.
The result is that systems of engagement must be super-agile, allowing them to be changed almost hourly, and to respond to demand whatever time of the day or night. Delivering platform agility and security are discussed later in Platforms and Controls.
Self Service
When user demands can be predicted, they often prefer to simply do it themselves. Self-service capabilities remove any language barriers or the need to speak to a person and reduces time to resolution significantly. Customers can see the options and may actually use additional features.
Delivering self-service as part of a digital transformation requires some form of process automation that includes business rules and integration. Removing the human element from a customer interaction will also remove their ability to look things up and make decisions
Extended Business Hours
Once a self-service capability is established it can be used to extend the working day to 24-hours and include bank holidays and weekends. Customers often benefit from being able to engage with their council or retailer during non-working hours.
Accessibility and Personalised Services
Engaging with demographic groups that have different abilities, languages, and expectations can be achieved by allowing them to personalise their experience. By inferring how best to interact with them from their feedback, organisations can increase the chances of customer satisfaction. In times gone by, the “portal” was how this was done, however configuration was manual and the technology not quite up to the challenge.
As part of your digital transformation, consider using process automation and learning from your customer’s data. It is possible to deliver services that are at least partially tailored to their unique needs before they even start to express their preferences.
Assured Sales Pathways
In industries that must demonstrate that information has been shared, and that all regulatory steps have been completed, it is important that the sales pathway is automated and sits behind all customer interactions. The result is that a buying journey that starts on a website or mobile application can be progressed and completed face to face or using any other available channel without loss of oversight and control.
2 – Corporate Efficiency
Digital Transformation can be used to improve corporate efficiency by introducing automation to aspects of the internal company. By improving how customer, supplier, and staff contacts are handled, time and money are saved at every interaction. Your staff can keep track and process more work, whilst customers and suppliers see a company that is responsive and consistent.
Decisions and Reporting
It has been estimated that perhaps 70% of decision time is spent collating data needed to inform the decision. That leaves 10% for decision making, and perhaps 20% of the time to confirm and communicate.
Group decisions and authorisations can consume a great deal of time just through the process of coordinating individuals for their input.
Automation can gather and present the relevant information alongside decision guidance, as well as coordinating multiple decision makers, and assuredly communicating the outcome. That 70% can soon be reduced to almost zero.
HR: Movers-Joiners-Leavers (MJL)
Everyone is a mover. Joiners are moving from nothing to something, Leavers the reverse. Movers either have something they no longer need and/or need new things.
An efficient moving process provides transparency and assurance that security is being observed, and that assets are being managed efficiently. It also assures that people have the training, tools, and permission that they need to effectively do their new work.
Leavers must return the tools and be stripped of permissions. The advent of cloud and Digital Transformation that includes external parties has increased the risk of failing to remove permissions when they are no longer relevant to an individual.
Joiners need training and orientation as well as tools and access to data and systems. They are often managed through a probationary period. This might also be true when changing their role, grade, or department.
Health and Safety
Near-miss, accidents, and dangerous equipment risk reporting can be simplified by automation. By allowing people to report problems, the company improves its safety records and reduces future accidents. These types of automation are often simple and highly effective.
Sharing information
Sharing information across departments and simplifying control handoff and improving operational insight and customer transparency.
Making sure that customer instructions. GDPR, risks and issues are accurately communicated in a timely manner.
Procurement
Sharing information across companies and simplifying control handoff and improving operational insight and supply chain transparency.
Securely sharing information and real time events between actors in the claim.
3 – Platforms and Controls
Digital Transformation is a never-ending voyage – a series of releases that stretch out into the future. The name implies a journey rather than a static once and done project.
Its all about Efficient change
A successful digital transformation is built on a platform that is structured to manage the cost, risk, and complexity of change.
Cost
Reducing the cost of operational change is not simple. Experience tells us that improved efficiency in software can reduce power and rack space demands but that the big costs are caused by inefficient ways of working, and in implementing change.
Well known approaches to understanding how working practices can be improved include six-sigma, process engineering, and business analysis. The challenge is that knowing a more efficient approach is a long way from implementing it.
Digital transformation is an excuse to try new things but only when the political will in the company is strong enough. We have the technology but that’s only half of the solution.
Cost savings to be realised by efficient change are enormous. By removing barriers to change we empower people to have ideas and suggest ways to be more efficient.
How many good ideas have never even been mentioned because they will never be implemented?
Digital transformation demands a platform that can simply and cheaply adapt to new threats and opportunities. A compartmentalised architecture naturally supports focused scaling to address hotspots, reduces the extensiveness of testing needed when changes are implemented, and avoids contagion when problems arise. It provides the ability to implement trials for new ideas.
Risk
Changing the way people work, the speed of business transactions, and introduction of new technologies is not without risk. New risks will be introduced, and old ones will change their nature. As with any journey, a guide is required to help navigate the possibilities.
Specific risks will depend on the nature of your individual transformation, and the order of implementation. Here are a few to illustrate the problem.
- Introducing self-service often increases call centre demand with questions about the new features.
- Faster transactions require faster checks and balances to detect fraud and other such problems.
- Extending to new customer groups will change the nature of the problems they encounter. It is likely that automations and user interfaces will go through a period of rapid change to adapt.
- Leaving people with permissions for external SaaS when they leave the company or change role.
Complexity
Problems can be solved by breaking them down into manageable parts and focusing on each one in turn. Faults are chased into a unit and squashed.
Why not arrange our enterprise architecture in a way that is already broken down into manageable parts? We could chase the complexity into encapsulated units and have specialists to focus their attention on specific technologies or logic. When problems arise in an isolated part of the architecture, we know that it cannot have come from outside. The result is faster problem determination, reduced testing effort, and simpler upgrades and change management.
Complexity cannot be destroyed, but it can be moved around and “hidden” from the majority.
Conclusion
Digital transformation is an excuse to change how you go to market and how you operate the business. It is as big or small as you want it to be. Whatever you decide, it is important to define the scope, and how you will measure success. As an initiative it has multiple outcomes, and the measure must be a combination of them all.
Solving tomorrow’s problems today requires us to predict the future, solving today’s problems tomorrow is too late.
Change can be an increase or decrease of demand, the need for additional functionality, or new ways to engage customers. It can be driven by regulation, customer expectations, raw material costs, or staff experience, skills, and capacity.
The good news is that we have good experience of trying to change business by changing technology, and we know that without the full support of business leaders it will not work. We know that even with perfect technology the failure to gain adoption means that the project fails.
To support innovation, enterprise technology must be optimised for change. It must be simple to extend and test, to upgrade and to replace parts, and it must scale to meet future demand.
Enabling Digital Transformation
Digital transformation demands a platform that can simply and cheaply adapt to new threats and opportunities. A compartmentalised architecture naturally supports focused scaling to address hotspots, reduces the extensiveness of testing needed when changes are implemented, and avoids contagion when problems arise.
The business gets a platform that can cheaply and quickly respond to change, with a manageable set of skills.
The problem is that microservice architectures, service-oriented architectures (SOA), and many before them have failed to deliver this vision.
The problem is in the detail. The compartmentalisation must be used to define usings of testing and release as well as each having rules about what is allowed into the component.
User engagement components must be allowed to change rapidly, scale up and down quickly, and be focused solely on supporting users – they cannot have other systems depending on them. This is achieved by making the containers stateless and assuring that they do not contain any business rules.
The result is a component that can be changed very quickly, tested fast, and deployed without risk of data corruption, loss, or inaccurate implementation of business policy.
Systems of Record must be in a container that is allowed to store data, and to implement business logic.
Responsiv Can Help
Business Efficiency | Cost Reduction | Simplifying change
Responsiv has delivered digital transformation projects for customers working in many different industries and situations. Our focus is on improving business efficiency and developing enterprise solutions that can grow and adapt with business demand. The Responsiv Cloud Automation Platform, combined with our experienced consulting services, delivers everything you need to support your digital transformation.
For an informal discussion about what is possible, or to investigate how you might progress your digital transformation please contact us.