Are you handling with Digital Transformation the right way ??

What is Digital Transformation exactly, what’s your pillars and how it interacts with others already known paradigms.

Currently, any type of business must make use of technology to improve its performance and, in this way, enhance and increase the reach of its results. Digital transformation is necessary to change organizations and businesses that want to remain competitive in the current scenario.

Digital transformation is not a trend but a reality. It is a process in which companies make use of technology to increase their reach, improve performance and thus obtain better results.

It is a structural change that begins with the leaders’ understanding of the future of business, the evolution of internal processes and the new operating models in the era of the connected consumer. Where the least that your user expects and that you connect with him the way he wants.

You need to always be seeking to keep its consumer at the center of its activities, transforming its user experience and understanding its customer’s journey. Defining points of contact and identifying new forms of communication.

For this, it needs to be constantly improving its employees, transforming and mapping operational processes. To always be training and managing in a performative way.

Use the technology to optimize operations, transform and find new business models and always stay measuring your results. Make your business adapt to the environment by changing the product that is provided by your company.

First of all, Digital Transformation it is not use more of IT technologies or take advantage of tools to improve your process and data. Before everything, you may need to take note of some terminologies.

Digitation is transforming your analogue resources into digital form. Papers and human process becoming bytes and online workflows.

Digitalization is about tools within technology. Embark your project, use wearables, automate and update the communication and media infrastructures. You can use cognitive computing for data analyses, software test automation, internet of things, etc.

In a formal way to say, Digital Transformation is the use of digital technologies to upgrade your internal operations and change process, to create an entire organizational transformation. Acting directly with the digital economy and digital innovation, building new business models, in order to improve the customer experience, providing society transformation with value creation refining products and services.

Elaborating, Digital Transformation consists of the core of the supply chain, providing new outcomes. It is related to the customer itself, focusing on the organizational change to deliver new value schemes for them. Building a cross-functional team and enabling holistic thinking. Creating a customer-driven-strategic and business transformation that need cross-organizational changes.

You already need to be resilient to deal with expected and unexpected changes but now, you need to handle paradigm shifts, and that put down slow and subtle transformations that redefine the essence of the industry. They are not quantifiable and have the capacity to disrupt the core essence of the industry.

The Digital Transformation brings us some paradigms that together create a brand new environment, combining issues with resource allocation, risk management and cost containment. Passing through all of that, you can achieve Digital Maturity Assessment. And you’ll be able to completely understand the customer needs and expectations, which are the goal of Digital Transformation.

Digital Transformation works directly with business models, people, culture, leadership and change. It is a profound transformation of business activities and competencies to fully leverage the opportunities of digital technologies. Understanding your customer and conducting your team through it, you can create your framework for your business model, based on customer info that might complement or even supplement its current business and market. You need to bring some comfort to your customers, have compassion, understand your emotions, with that you build real value in a relationship.

The keynote speaker Greg Verdino once says, “Digital Transformation closes the gap between what digital customers already expect and what analog business actually deliver”.

You need to be careful with what and how much you change; you cannot impact the quality of customer relationships. Take a bank business for instance, this from ages represents a close relationship between the enterprise and its customers. This relation is basically built on trust, a human concept. Nowadays banks are full of digital channels, to bring more comfort and agility in your actions with customers, using chatbots and providing means for helping them to make buying decisions.

So you are creating a paradox, the customer opinions and expectations are getting influenced before they have any real human interaction, you are replacing humans by the digital channels since those chatbots cannot understand emotions, as sarcasm or cynicism for example. How can enterprises want to create a meaningful and long-lasting relationship with customers, if there is hardly any real interaction with humans ??

While you are adopting more digital channels to improve the communication and interactions with your customers, that will be creating a void between the company and them. Therefore, you’ll have impacts directly on the quality of customer relationships, and that is one critical pillar of the bank industry.

Let’s talk about what it is not Digital Transformation:

Digital Transformation is not an IT initiative. Essentially is to create models to customer-driven-strategic and problem-driven, providing a competitive advantage.

Digital Transformation is not Data Management, on the wise of capture and storage, it improves the business process and defines every data field to be a business utility, providing completely data consumption, improving decision making.

Digital Transformation is not fancy dashboards or colourful infographics full of machine learning and AI. Actually is uses quality data together with your customer, questioning assumptions about his business environment.

Some questions and thoughts for the future about estimating the value generated by the digital initiative:

If you are on the path to digital transformation. Are you aware of the value for society of your digital initiatives ??

And can you measure and track the socio-economic impact of your future digital initiatives ??

Also, how can you generate digital initiatives that in the future could deliver high value to society and your business ??

Finally, the gap between the customers and the human part of enterprises is getting wider every day. In general, you need to be careful to not misunderstand the concepts of the Digital Transformation, so that you don’t make hasty decisions or make mistakes in your implementation.

I hope that article helps you to understand some terms about Digital Transformation and how Digital Transformation should work as well as figure out what is and what is not Digital Transformation.

My regards.

Felipe Genaro.