Business digital transformation, it can get your pulse racing as you look for the nearest exit. It is being asked of everybody to get involved but have we a sufficient understanding of it?

Add in the magic ‘need’ so innovation can benefit from this business digital transformation and we begin to shift around in our chairs even more. What would it mean if we ‘went’ digital and transformed ourselves for innovation within our organization?

I’ll be honest here, all the answers can’t be distilled here in this one post as I’m still working on them, but I thought an opening set of thoughts might trigger greater discussion.

So what is digital transformation?

We needed to step back and ask, what is truly transformational? Scott Anthony, the MD of Innosight wrote recently on this: “What do you really mean by business transformation”. He broke down the fundamental different categories of the effort put in to achieve some ‘sort’ of transformation.

The first is operational, or doing what you are currently doing, better, faster or cheaper.

The second category focuses on the operational model, doing ‘things’ in a fundamentally different way

His final one has the most promise and peril, that is strategic. This is as he puts it transformation with a big capital “T” because it involves changing the very essence of a company.

So defining transformation when it is dropped into the next conversation is to ask what do you truly mean? He goes onto suggest a dual transformation might be an answer. I could really expand on that one but not here as I would subscribe to this myself as we need to have a dual mentality of exploit and explore in our innovation activity. As a taster on this, I wrote something here.

We should link up digital transformation into its business purpose.

Undergoing any transformation must be for a reason (well hopefully) as it does incur a lot of pain before you get to the gain. Moving closer to our innovation need we can see digital transformation everywhere, it is actually all around us. The customer today feels a growing empowerment, in choice in personalization, in knowing the products or service they are buying are meeting their needs and these are becoming increasingly intelligent to meet these needs. Companies need to increasingly interact with customers, as close or actually in real-time to learn, adapt and deliver to the needs. This requires a company to become far more ‘highly automated and adaptive’.

To get to this transforming point we need to build in faster adaptation of business strategies and turn out faster innovation outcomes that meet these needs as key to this. Our transformation journey needs to embrace cloud, mobile, data and networks and rely on higher levels of analytics to interpret and translate information, into insights, into ideas, into innovation that delivers.

Now that really becomes transforming.

There is a rub here, most transformation projects seem to fail.

McKinsey in 2011 identified that 72% of transformation programs fail to deliver on their targets so there is an awful lot of thinking, planning and working through any transformation to make sure you end up on the 28% of the success stories.

I could outline countless ways to work through different examples, set about a strategic and operational digital transformation roadmap, to combine effective knowledge from people and excellence gained from what you need to do in IT and your technologies to get this going, but I will not here, as this is an opening primer not a solution.

Yet if we want to enable innovation and digital transformation we need to work through three phases of detailed work:

The appropriate identification to analyse existing strategy, identify the competitive forces, understand the business model drivers and pull together in an outline the objectives, performance and value opportunities;

Set about planning these out, analyse, discovering potential pain points, the critical success factors, benchmarking others, defining the innovation and transformational need;

We go to the creation part, what we can do and this requires producing different strategic maps, scorecards, value maps, performance measures and finally how we would prioritize innovation and those transformation initiatives.

Now that calls for some hard work and again, outside the scope here in providing just this teaser.

SUMMARIZE IT IN MAXIMUM 50 WORDS

Question

Business digital transformation, it can get your pulse racing as you look for the nearest exit. It is being asked of everybody to get involved but have we a sufficient understanding of it?

Add in the magic ‘need’ so innovation can benefit from this business digital transformation and we begin to shift around in our chairs even more. What would it mean if we ‘went’ digital and transformed ourselves for innovation within our organization?

I’ll be honest here, all the answers can’t be distilled here in this one post as I’m still working on them, but I thought an opening set of thoughts might trigger greater discussion.

So what is digital transformation?

We needed to step back and ask, what is truly transformational? Scott Anthony, the MD of Innosight wrote recently on this: “What do you really mean by business transformation”. He broke down the fundamental different categories of the effort put in to achieve some ‘sort’ of transformation.

The first is operational, or doing what you are currently doing, better, faster or cheaper.

The second category focuses on the operational model, doing ‘things’ in a fundamentally different way

His final one has the most promise and peril, that is strategic. This is as he puts it transformation with a big capital “T” because it involves changing the very essence of a company.

So defining transformation when it is dropped into the next conversation is to ask what do you truly mean? He goes onto suggest a dual transformation might be an answer. I could really expand on that one but not here as I would subscribe to this myself as we need to have a dual mentality of exploit and explore in our innovation activity. As a taster on this, I wrote something here.

We should link up digital transformation into its business purpose.

Undergoing any transformation must be for a reason (well hopefully) as it does incur a lot of pain before you get to the gain. Moving closer to our innovation need we can see digital transformation everywhere, it is actually all around us. The customer today feels a growing empowerment, in choice in personalization, in knowing the products or service they are buying are meeting their needs and these are becoming increasingly intelligent to meet these needs. Companies need to increasingly interact with customers, as close or actually in real-time to learn, adapt and deliver to the needs. This requires a company to become far more ‘highly automated and adaptive’.

To get to this transforming point we need to build in faster adaptation of business strategies and turn out faster innovation outcomes that meet these needs as key to this. Our transformation journey needs to embrace cloud, mobile, data and networks and rely on higher levels of analytics to interpret and translate information, into insights, into ideas, into innovation that delivers.

Now that really becomes transforming.

There is a rub here, most transformation projects seem to fail.

McKinsey in 2011 identified that 72% of transformation programs fail to deliver on their targets so there is an awful lot of thinking, planning and working through any transformation to make sure you end up on the 28% of the success stories.

I could outline countless ways to work through different examples, set about a strategic and operational digital transformation roadmap, to combine effective knowledge from people and excellence gained from what you need to do in IT and your technologies to get this going, but I will not here, as this is an opening primer not a solution.

Yet if we want to enable innovation and digital transformation we need to work through three phases of detailed work:

The appropriate identification to analyse existing strategy, identify the competitive forces, understand the business model drivers and pull together in an outline the objectives, performance and value opportunities;
Set about planning these out, analyse, discovering potential pain points, the critical success factors, benchmarking others, defining the innovation and transformational need;
We go to the creation part, what we can do and this requires producing different strategic maps, scorecards, value maps, performance measures and finally how we would prioritize innovation and those transformation initiatives.

Now that calls for some hard work and again, outside the scope here in providing just this teaser.

SUMMARIZE IT IN MAXIMUM 50 WORDS

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