Over the last few years, I have had the opportunity to work with clients at the early stages of their digital transformation journey. My team is often asked to come in and help work through strategy, develop roadmaps, and ultimately prioritize what is going to be done first.
While not always spoken aloud, a common question or line of thinking tends to emerge at the start of each project – what are the levers we have to make this go faster?
The truth is, there isn’t always a way to go “faster”, but there are levers (or areas of considerations) that we typically look at that help set the direction, scope, and pace of the work that follows.
1) Customer Experience
2) Data, BI & Analytics
3) B2B eCommerce and Marketplaces
4) Digital Business Capabilities and Change Management
5) Enterprise Systems Vitality
This post gives you a quick snapshot of these levers, why they are essential, and suggestions on achieving fast business value wins.
Customer Experience (CX) is the perception that customers, based on interactions with your companies people and technology, shape their opinion about the company and build a lasting relationship.
Putting customers first at every stage is critical. Jeannie Walters shares some effective strategies to help do so in this article.The companies that do well can turn the experiences they create for their customers into a competitive advantage. Good CX increases revenue while reducing the costs of serving customers. If not done well, customers will stop doing business with a company because of a poor CX.
Research tells us that 64% of B2B buyers place more importance on experience than price, and the number one experience requirement customers are looking for is efficiency.
Determine the high-priority customer touchpoints. Move iteratively through each touchpoint or series of touchpoints and progressively provide the customer with a practical experience going from functional to reliable to usable interactions and then providing the customer with an emotional experience going from desirable and frictionless.
Business intelligence and advanced analytics are data-oriented management techniques that businesses of any size and type can leverage to improve their operations and revenue.
Business intelligence is about reporting, and advanced analytics is about optimizing, associating, and predicting. Read more about what business intelligence is here and the differences between BI and advanced analytics here.
The business insight gained from each is different:
Data-driven digital transformation helps organizations deliver on critical business situations. For example:
To learn more about how to lead a data-driven digital transformation, watch this webinar from Ray Wang of the Harvard Business Review.
DAMA's International's Guide to the Data Management Body of Knowledge suggests the following sequential approach:
Unfortunately, there is no shortcutting the four sequential phases outlined above. However, what can be done is prioritize the business questions to be answered and then cycle through the four phases. A good starting point is to follow revenue streams and data investments to focus on the highest impact business areas.
Manufacturers and distributors require eCommerce software much like OroCommerce that understands the business of B2B and delivers eCommerce experiences that go beyond transactions. Learn more about B2B eCommerce in this blog by OroCommerce.
Backed by a product data management system and Integrated with back-end ERP, CRM, and TMS systems, B2B buyers find better prices and convenience.
B2B marketplace eCommerce is the selling of goods via a platform-based web application. On the platform, there are many sellers, many buyers and a marketplace owner.
With the advancements in digital technologies and evolving customer preferences, B2B buyers are moving online to do business. Did you know:
Business capabilities are a list of proficiencies required to operate the day-to-day business, grow, adapt, and acquire a competitive advantage.
Typically, a subset of the leading digital business capabilities that an organization requires includes:
Being successful in digital transformation is not just a function of rolling out new technology. Technology must be seamlessly integrated with the supporting people, process and governance components to succeed. Otherwise, there will not be a successful adoption, and the ROI will not be obtained.
Introducing digital business capabilities will likely disrupt how things are accomplished in the present time, requiring a focus on the people side of change from the start. While it can be tempting to think of change management in a project context, it is important to look at change from a larger transformation perspective where the focus should be on helping stakeholders understand the change, it’s impact, and how they will be supported and effective in the future state.
To accomplish this quickly, ensure that change management is integrated from the start and that it is viewed from the perspective of a transformational change, not just a project. Rolling out new business capabilities needs to be considered in step with the digital transformation roadmap rollout. Five critical steps of the change management process are highlighted in this article from the Harvard Business Review.
These capabilities must be defined, and employees' preparation for change should be in lockstep with any new digital transformation levers (for example, CX, eCommerce, or data capabilities).
Ageing legacy systems are typically built on outdated architectures with high maintenance costs, inherent inflexibility, redundant features, lack of connectivity and overall low efficiency.
These legacy applications, however, contain mission-critical data and perform critical functions.
Aging legacy systems can get in the way of delivering value to the business and its customers and are often at odds with current digital transformation plans.
Completely replacing legacy systems is a time-consuming, expensive, and risky endeavour. In this fast-paced digital era, distributors and manufacturers cannot afford missteps. A key question is can you achieve high-priority business value and not immediately replace the entire legacy enterprise systems? This article from Gartner provides some options on ways to modernize legacy systems and keep gaining business value from them.
Three interrelated approaches can be considered to achieve business value quickly:
Through this post, I hope you are able to take away and implement some quick wins that will help you understand where best to focus your efforts when pursuing digital transformation. We’ve discussed the importance of practical and personalized customer experience, how to prioritize business questions to then cycle through the phases of data management, and why technology must be seamlessly integrated with people and business processes in order to overcome barriers to achieving ROI.
Most important is to ensure that your digital transformation and the levers you will manipulate are integrated into a coherent narrative that can be used to explicitly describe the desired destination of the transformation and how we will get from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow.