Managed Digital transformation
Be it a modern enterprise or a legacy core manufacturing company, everyone is striving for better efficiency and return on investment. The key challenges are:
1. What are the critical levers for success?
2. Where to start?
3. How to sustain transformation?
With the very need for adoption, the collaborative experience based transformation journey and final user experience towards the end product usability becomes key for transformation.
Experience design is increasingly becoming critical to operations transformation as its approach seeks to deliver a stronger emotional impact that helps realize strategic goals of the company. While it brings usability at the core, the focus is on the adoption and decreased repulsion by key stakeholders. E.g. If you bring an IOT based sensor for Tea plantation quality checks to a Senior Quality Inspector who is used to tasting tea for 20 years, he will simply not approve it. That is where the humane part of the application is important, wherein people with a DIY approach, easily set up their parameters for testing, review the KPI performance and easily approve as per business needs. It helps them to engage, flexibility to change and finally brings the right level of business adoptions. On the ROI side, you get faster outputs and better connect to end customers via Digitalization.
Design Thinking recognizes the fact that one size fits all. Personalization driven by insights and business experience is the key to adoption. So, both process and content must adapt as per the user experience demand.
The critical levers of Design Powered Digital Transformation are:
1. Customer journey Design
Customer journey and process reimagination based experience is the key to any significant transformation. Human-centered design is key to any business aiming to be customer-driven and enable adoption among customers. Here, the sensitivity of Design Thinking combined with the power of innovative business transformation techniques allows enterprises to digital engage in unique and personalized way via the right mix of people, process, content, and technology. Insights and process mining based reengineering principles play a significant role in driving the core of the to-be journey. The technique is the drive a persona-based customer journey, define business priorities, align them to human action, conduct level 1 surveys and interviews and then enable the right user experience.
Data-driven insight at the core is the key to personalization and any innovations which will be incremental as you move forward.
2. Agile at Core of Business Transformation
Companies need to realize that any transformation has to keep evolving. In this competitive environment, getting things first time right is not always the case. You need to create a culture of experimentation and agile engineering. You need even fail sometimes to see how to move forward. As an example, GE’s transition from a core Hardware company to a Software driven ‘as a service’ model should be a lesson to all transformation seekers.
To stay agile is to collaborate and own the mistakes of yourself and even for your team. The assets and information should be open to all. It doesn’t need to be the best-structured process, but the incremental output should be neat and visible for quick feedback.
Rapid prototyping is another critical enabler for incremental organic growth. If you can €™t see an output, the rest of the actions and approach doesn’t matter. Those outputs should be verified then and there and needs to be given feedback. If it has better ease of operations, then it will get adopted. If it €™s wrong, then it will go for another rapid prototype cycle. Closed loop feedback and incremental outputs are the best way even to spend your money. Correct tool (DevOps) and cost governance with an end goal status report accessible to all is another necessary evil. It will take an initial adaptation to understand and get along the agile ways of working, but eventually, it will work its output. Some companies have let go decades of losses, by staying merely agile at the core.
3. Focus Innovation for sustainable business model
Any lasting transformation needs to be innovation-led. You need to tap into the latest technical hubs and lookout for the right mix of solution which will lead your business at least for next one decade. These innovations don’t need to be your inventions. Today cloud has enabled almost all innovation ‘as a service’ which can be accessed on an OPEX model. Artificial intelligence, Cognition, and Robotics Process Automation are leading the way for most of the advances in operations harmonization and transformations. Enterprises who are not run on innovations are very soon going to get disrupted. Their competition is already firing on all automation cylinders, so even you need to upgrade yourself to stay relevant and competitive.
4. Continuous People Change
As the experience of new tools upgrades, the ease of operation should also increase. However, any change is tough for any human being. The reasons could be job security, education, flexibility to learn and enthusiasm to upskill. To enable such a change towards an existing human resource pool, executives need to buckle up and enforce change. Such enforcement can be driven by a variety of strategies, like financial incentives, team motivation, benefits coaching, mobility and workplace improvement. Once the resources are trained, a change and LOB self-governance powered operating model should be enabled so that individuals don’t just contribute but also quickly reap the benefits of getting digital.
Overall Digital is for the ease of operations for People. So, the people aspect, being customer, employee or partners should be well taken care of.
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