Preparing your organization for the new data-driven future
The new digital age we are suddenly catapulted into comes with wide-reaching, fundamental changes. To prepare your organization to operate and flourish in the new data-driven future and evolve towards a composable business fit for this emerging digital age, digital transformation is key.
Key considerations are:
- How to ensure that your organization can easily and continuously transform its products
- How to easily and continuously optimize your operation
- How to create new innovative ways to engage with your customers
- How to ensure that everybody in your organization can easily access and leverage any data available in the organization for various purposes
It is much more important to consider your future ability to do all these things easily and continuously, rather than what exactly it is you will be doing. After all, the latter is unsure and unpredictable and will continuously change over time.
How you will transform your products, how you will optimize further, how you will engage with your customers and users, and how you will empower your employees with data: all of that will continuously change year after year. At the outset, what is crucial is how you will set up your business so that you will be able to do those things easily and continuously. Today you are building the foundation of your business for the coming decade, and you are defining your readiness to deal with the inevitable unexpected.
These are the key objectives you need to keep in mind, because evolving towards an agile data-driven operation involves much more than simply choosing the right technology and "putting that technology into place". For example, a lot hinges on how your operation is rebuilt and redesigned conceptually, and on how the entire operational technology stack is architected to create an agile operation. The latter requires careful consideration, as it is very easy to choose for the easy way forward and the path of least resistance, but that usually then also means that you completely give up on the very essence of creating an agile data-driven operation, i.e. creating an operation ready to continuously evolve. Simply taking the business and operation of yesterday and transposing it into the new technology ecosystem will not suffice.
The success of a digital transformation also heavily relies on the effectiveness of the accompanying change management programs. These determine how well you prepare your organization for the changes involved in the transition, how well you manage adoption and mitigate risks, and – very importantly – how well you deal with the human aspects that play into all of this. Because after all, a successful digital transformation has a fundamental impact on all imaginable aspects of your existing operation and business, and the human factor in this is not to be underestimated, especially when you consider the inherent resistance to change of both people and organizations.
Many other things are also essential for a successful digital transformation. For more information, refer to Digital Transformation Archives. This includes:
What is digital transformation? Preparing an organization to be successful in a data-driven future translates into building an agile operation that can quickly shift and change directions to deal with the unexpected. To find out more about the key objectives, pitfalls, and essential ingredients for success, watch the video What is digital transformation?.
What are complex ecosystems? A complex system is an environment with a lot of interconnected components, which all affect and influence each other in many ways, so that it is very difficult to see how this system behaves as a whole. For more information on the mindset needed for success, as well as the strategy and methodologies required, watch the video What are complex ecosystems?.
What is agile? Agility is one of your keys to success. Find out more about the essence of agile, the common pitfalls, and how you can successfully become agile in the video What is agile?.
What about goals and requirements? When people and organizations set goals and objectives, they tend to immediately translate them into very detailed requirements. However, this habit no longer belongs in the age of digital transformation, where you face environments with infinite options and where the desired outcome is elusive. Find out more in the video What about goals and requirements?.