Today every part of the business is subject to new expectations, competitors, channels, threats, and opportunities. Every business has the potential to be a digital business.
Businesses that digitally transform will be able to connect more closely with customers, speed up the pace of innovation, and, as a result, claim a greater share of profit in their sectors. Today digitally transformed companies have an edge; tomorrow, only digital businesses will succeed.
Here is my version of A-Z of Digital Transformation.
Artificial Intelligence: AI is the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior. BMW, Tesla, and Google are using AI for self-driving cars. AI should be used to solve real-world tough problems like climate modeling to disease analysis and betterment of humanity
Big Data: This serves as a foundational backbone for digital transformation. Hyper-personalization and real-time recommendations based on the geolocation of the customers will be the key to success. Big Data Analytics is the driving force for action.
Customer Centricity: The most important theme of digital transformation is it should be customer focused with a consistent, enjoyable, and very personal experience for customers. You can also C for Cloud Computing to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale.
Disruption: Digital has disrupted many businesses so far that did not take it seriously like Blockbuster, Kodak, and Borders, and brought new leaders on the horizon like Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, and Spotify. Digital Customer Experience: The sum of all interactions a customer has with a company, enabled by digital technologies.
Employee-driven: Digital Transformation will be successful only when employees are involved, educated, and empowered to enhance the customer experience.
Fail Fast: Digital is all about deploying quick PoCs and checking the outcome. If it does not work then drop the concept/idea and move on to a new one. Be prepared to change the pace or direction as necessary.
Growth Hacking: Focuses on building products that fit the market needs, with a viral push to market with a very simple idea & all the digital tools like email, tweets, and blogs. Zynga used FB alerts and online adverts while DropBox offered extra storage space for referring friends for growth.
Hyper-personalization: Use of browsing histories, past purchases, social media data, and internal customer data to provide more personalized and targeted products, services, and content. It is about being relevant at the right place and the right time to the right person.
Internet of things: All businesses are aiming at reaching their customers anywhere, anytime, on any platform with any device. All such smart devices or physical objects that are connected to the internet, are continuously emitting data and communicating with each other. IoT-based real-time predictive maintenance in manufacturing is becoming important to save costs and downtime. Industry 4.0: The fourth industrial revolution, characterized by the integration of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and blockchain into traditional manufacturing and industrial practices.
Journey Maps: Creating customer journey maps is the prime and initial milestone for digital transformation where you understand the pitfalls and pain points with every touch point you have with customers. Once they are in place then plan with the most impacting problems.
Knowledge Management: The process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge within an organization.
Leadership Support: Without actual drive from CEO and Board members, digital will not move further as it involves cultural business transformation.
Mobile First: Today we live in an “always on, always connected” world, and use mobile for almost everything. We spend more time on mobile than any other digital channel. Start your digital implementation with mobile-first in mind. Machine Learning: A type of artificial intelligence that allows software applications to become more accurate in predicting outcomes without being explicitly programmed by a human.
NFC: Near Field Communication is used for a contactless, WiFi-style technology that could already be in your smartphone. A few years from now your credit cards, bus passes, train tickets, and loyalty cards for high street coffee shops will be gone due to digital transformation and you only carry your phone.
Omni-Channel: It is about the true continuity of customers’ experience even when they flip channels to complete a single transaction with a seamless experience across all channels, including in-store, online, and mobile. Disney, Virgin Atlantic, and Starbucks are great examples of Omni-Channel digital transformation.
Process Optimization: The use of technology and data analysis to streamline and improve business processes, resulting in increased efficiency and productivity.
Quality: The quality of data collected by all channels is extremely important in digital transformation for generating meaningful insights. Garbage in, Garbage Out still remains valid in the digital age.
Robotic Process Automation: Robots are machines with programmed movements that allow them to move in certain directions or sequences to automate repetitive and manual tasks, allowing employees to focus on higher-value work. Artificial intelligence has given robots more ability to process information and to learn.
Sentiment Analytics: Sentiment analysis is all about helping companies gain better insights into their customers, and helping them to bridge the gap between insight and action by analyzing positive and negative sentiments. Social Media: Online platforms and tools that allow individuals and organizations to share content and collaborate.
Talent: To deliver on digital transformation, organizations have to get the right talent. As Jim Collins said in his book “Good to Great”, get the right people on the bus put them in the right sits, and then decide where the bus will go. Telecommuting: The ability to work remotely, enabled by digital technologies such as videoconferencing, cloud computing, and collaboration software.
User Experience: This is extremely important considering the focus on the customer. The use of responsive web designs to adjust to any screen size with ease, make the website accessible on any platform, intuitive and pleasant to use is the key.
Virtual Reality: Virtual Reality is making a lot of impact on the world we live in today. Everything that we know about our reality comes by way of our 5 senses – Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch & Taste. Today Real Estate, Travel companies are coming up with VR gadgets to give the feel of virtual walks of houses or destinations like the Eiffel tower / or Grand Canyon experience on your living room couch.
Wearables: They come in various forms, like smartwatches, health trackers, Google Glass, interactive clothing, gesture controllers and the list goes on. Sooner or later, all of us are identified by the data we generate, and wearables represent a quantum leap in the type and quantity of data collected — which is both an interesting and a scary proposition
Xamarin: A modern programming language for iOS, Android & Windows mobile platforms.
Yarn: The earlier map-reduce has undergone a complete overhaul and is now called yarn which allows multiple data processing engines such as interactive SQL, real-time streaming, data science, and batch processing to handle data stored in a single platform.
ZooKeeper: ZooKeeper is a Hadoop centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services.
Digital Transformation brings changes in product creation and delivery, changes in IT infrastructure, and changes in the consumption and payment methods to ‘go digital’.