In our digital world, all organizations are battling similar challenges, globally. Digital transformation requires a digital transformation strategy that, as any strategy, looks at the goals, current situation and also the means to maneuver forward on a transformational journey during the simplest way that makes sense and connects the dots. a look at key inquiries to ask your digital transformation strategy.
Companies across the globe are digitally transforming as they’re challenged to boost business processes and develop new capabilities and business models. In an economic reality where entire industries are changing, actionable intelligence is the new currency. Data and knowledge became core business assets, sources of revenue and important enablers within the fashionable era . To reap the benefits of latest technologies, subsequent stages in the epoch and thus the digital transformation economy, organizations ought to be ready for accelerating evolutions, higher business agility and so the increasing role of all kinds of data and knowledge .
Most importantly, they need to be able to develop a digital transformation strategy and build bridges in several areas, which are related with information, data, processes, technologies, human aspects and much more. A digital transformation strategy starts with answering essential questions just like the what, why, how and who. A digital transformation strategy builds bridges between current state and desired long-term plan. And as digital transformation by definition is holistic and requires integration and collaboration, a digital transformation strategy looks at building blocks and thus the bridges to connect them, also as barriers and new bridges to beat them.
In a business reality where ‘the business’, with variety one (yet, non-exclusive) role for marketing and so the CMO, increasingly takes decisions on technology budgets, we see that it’s often hard for IT and knowledge management professionals, who are essential in digital transformation, to speak the language of the CMO or other business executives, which traditionally didn’t belong to their ‘target audience’. It’s one amongst the reasons why IT firms are building or acquiring ‘digital transformation consultancies’ with roots in marketing/business or even agencies, which can help them in properly understanding and addressing the wants of these a-typical audiences. It’s also the rationale why some consultancy-oriented firms, who are very vocal within the digital transformation scope, encounter challenges of growth.
They can’t answer the increasingly end-to-end digital transformation strategy needs of companies as they miss the profound IT and knowledge management skills. In other words: for several of them it’s hard to form the bridges that are required within the holistic phenomenon that covers many realities and skill sets and is known as digital transformation. It’s not just the IT and knowledge management folks that struggle to speak the language of, let’s say, the CMO. The alternative way around, many marketing executives, don’t speak the language of IT and/or aren’t used to think and add terms of business process management, essential technological evolutions and concepts or methods of business process reengineering and/or business process optimization.
There are more bridges to form than simply those between the ‘IT and knowledge management side’ and ‘the business side’. We’ve covered this necessity previously from the attitude of knowledge as a bridge builder within the following stage of the knowledge age, whereby information bridges need to exist between rear and front office, content and processes (integration), human and machine and machine to machine (the Internet of Things), data and actionable intelligence, etc. It’s equally critical to integrate information/content and processes, with the business and knowledge worker in mind as previously mentioned.
To successfully navigate digital transformation and protect against digital disruption, all organizations ought to develop three core capabilities, says Professor Michael Wade: hyper-awareness, informed decision making and fast execution. It’s probably not that tough to imagine what proportion bridging of processes, people, information sources and existing silos and gaps that needs attention.
Ultimately a digital transformation strategy is also an inspiration of action describing how a business must strategically reposition itself within the digital economy. As customer habits change, so do the way winning businesses operate. They innovate, change operating and business models and leverage emerging technology. Join the revolution, and start building your bridges towards a digital first business strategy.
