Vikas Mujumdar, February 3, 2020
Digital Transformation and the Adoption of Emerging Technology is the need of the hour for all businesses. However, technology is growing at a far more rapid pace than businesses, or even the human mind, can adopt. This is causing a disruptive stress in organizations that do not have the mindset to adopt these new technologies but creating opportunities for growth and competitive advantage in organizations that are able to adopt the right technology for the right purpose.
There are four pillars to a successful digital transformation initiative:
- Understanding the Technology Options
- Analyzing the Optimization Opportunities
- Designing the Right Solution
- Implementing the Solution
A successful digital transformation in any area of your business should be measurable in one or more of the following metrics:
- Increased Process Efficiency (IPE)
- Reduced Human Intervention (RHI)
- Improved Customer Experience (ICE)
- Increase EBITDA
From a limited understanding of finance, I understand IPE and RHI will achieve reduced operating costs while ICE could contribute to increased revenues.
The technology to leverage can be evaluated across multiple axes:
- Target Metrics: What are the primary objectives?
- Complexity: Does your ecosystem have the required skills?
- Total Cost of Ownership: Factor in everything that is required to build and run the solution.
- Total Time to Market/Implement: This could be a long-term plan but that needs to be well thought through and the business or market should have the need at that time in the future. More importantly, solutions should not lag behind technology evolution.
Technology can be categorized across 5 vertical layers, that can also be mapped to an implementation architecture. Start from the foundation, add solutions critical to run your business well, and optimize those solutions as required. This is a good state to achieve, and only when stable in this state should a business consider solutions for a competitive advantage, and even later, disruptive solutions.
- Infrastructure
- Core Enterprise
- Optimization
- Competitive Advantage
- Disruption