Are you handling with Digital Transformation the right way ??

What is Digital Transformation exactly, what’s your pillars and how it interacts with other already known paradigms.

First of all, Digital Transformation is not more usage of IT Technologies, taking advantage of tools to improve your process and data. Before, you need to take note of some terminologies.

Digitation is transforming your analogue resources into digital form. Papers and human process becoming bytes and online workflows.

Digitalization is about tools within technology. Embark your project, use wearables, automate and update the communication and media infrastructures. You can use cognitive computing for data analyses, software test automation, internet of things, etc.

In a formal way to say, Digital Transformation is the use of digital technologies to upgrade your internal operations and change process, to create an entire organizational transformation. Acting directly with the digital economy and digital innovation, building new business models, in order to improve the customer experience, providing society transformation with value creation refining products and services.

Elaborating, Digital Transformation consists of the core of the supply chain, providing new outcomes. It is related to the customer itself, focusing on the organizational change to deliver new value schemes for them. Building a cross-functional team and enabling holistic thinking. Creating a customer-driven-strategic and business transformation that need cross-organizational changes.

You already need to be resilient to deal with expected and unexpected changes but now, you need to handle paradigm shifts, and that put down slow and subtle transformations that redefine the essence of the industry. They are not quantifiable and have the capacity to disrupt the core essence of the industry.

The Digital Transformation brings us some paradigms that together create a brand new environment, combining issues with resource allocation, risk management and cost containment. Passing through all of that, you can achieve Digital Maturity Assessment. And you’ll be able to completely understand the customer needs and expectations, which are the goal of Digital Transformation.

Digital Transformation works directly with business models, people, culture, leadership and change. It is a profound transformation of business activities and competencies to fully leverage the opportunities of digital technologies. Understanding your customer and conducting your team through it, you can create your framework for your business model, based on customer info that might complement or even supplement its current business and market. You need to bring some comfort to your customers, have compassion, understand your emotions, with that you build real value in a relationship.

The keynote speaker Greg Verdino once says, “Digital Transformation closes the gap between what digital customers already expect and what analog business actually deliver”.

You need to be careful with what and how much you change; you cannot impact the quality of customer relationships. Take a bank business for instance, this from ages represents a close relationship between the enterprise and its customers. This relation is basically built on trust, a human concept. Nowadays banks are full of digital channels, to bring more comfort and agility in your actions with customers, using chatbots and providing means for helping them to make buying decisions.

So you are creating a paradox, the customer opinions and expectations are getting influenced before they have any real human interaction, you are replacing humans by the digital channels since those chatbots cannot understand emotions, as sarcasm or cynicism for example. How can enterprises want to create a meaningful and long-lasting relationship with customers, if there is hardly any real interaction with humans ??

While you are adopting more digital channels to improve the communication and interactions with your customers, that will be creating a void between the company and them. Therefore, you’ll have impacts directly on the quality of customer relationships, and that is one critical pillar of the bank industry.

Let’s finish talking about what it is not Digital Transformation:

Digital Transformation is not an IT initiative. Essentially is to create models to customer-driven-strategic and problem-driven, providing a competitive advantage.

Digital Transformation is not Data Management, on the wise of capture and storage, it improves the business process and defines every data field to be a business utility, providing completely data consumption, improving decision making.

Digital Transformation is not fancy dashboards or colourful infographics full of machine learning and AI. Actually is uses quality data together with your customer, questioning assumptions about his business environment.

The void between the customers and the human part of enterprises is getting wider every day. In general, you need to be careful to not misunderstand the concepts of the Digital Transformation, so that you don’t make hasty decisions or make mistakes in your implementation.

I hope that article helps you to understand some terms about Digital Transformation and how Digital Transformation should work as well as figure out what is and what is not Digital Transformation.

My regards.
Felipe Genaro.