Before speaking about how to start a digital transformation journey I would like to clarify what is not digital transformation (DX)
DX is not:
- Increasing digital presence by improving your SEO or social media strategies
- Going paperless
- Creating the e-commerce channel or improving your online store
- Buying a new CRM software
- Updating your systems or applications
DX is much more than a digital technology based process that transforms culture and business models to meet new market needs.
In my opinion:
“DX is a game – changing mindset that enables disruptive innovation by encouraging organisations to focus on predicting future market needs, and aligning them with the business model and culture in a data driven eco-system to nurture current markets and create new ones.”
Why and when to start the DX journey?
The following situations indicate that you might need to start the DX journey:
- You know your customers from a demographic perspective, but you don’t have a clue about where, how and when they knew about your value proposition and what really triggered their first purchase
- You are unable to map and track your customer journey
- Your customer service team is totally overwhelmed, unable to achieve their CSAT KPIs
- You have all the data that you need somewhere in your multiple systems, and you are unable to unlock it and use it
- Your speed to market is very slow, even though you keep buying the best available systems in the market
- Your e-commerce sales increased considerably due to Covid-19, unfortunately not as a result of delivering a fantastic buying experience
- You are unable to innovate, even though you hire the best available talent
- Delivering projects at scale and on time and budget seems to be an impossible mission
- You are unable to monitor and control your operative processes and costs
How do you start the DX journey?
Strategic alignment
The business strategy must be totally aligned with your DX strategy, so a good starting point could be to make sure every single employee has the same understanding about what is the core business, corporate values, value proposition, competitors and target market.
Understand your market by creating a customer life cycle roadmap
In a few words, try to analyse and document the current interaction between your brands and customers, map and track all the touch points and validate the level of impact and influence in terms of recognised value.
Evaluate your operative strategy and structure
Operative strategy is basically the path that companies follow in terms of how they operate today on a daily basis in order to be competitive in the future, this includes who is doing it (structure) and what kind of resources/assets they are currently using.
In my opinion data is the most critical asset, the question is how connected, actionable, reliable and updated is your data today?
Align your people and culture
Adopting DX is not only about training people on new technologies, it’s about how receptive to change they are. DX demands a new mindset towards daily work, for example a good outcome could be to stop challenging people and start challenging processes, and more importantly, understanding the importance of aligning the business model with the customer’s needs, not with the employee’s needs or current business capabilities.
Training people from a technical perspective is paramount, but don’t forget about enabling them to embrace change from a more holistic point of view, as changing the “ we have always done things this way” kind of thinking is a much bigger challenge than teaching them how to master a new software. DX adoption takes place organically on open-minded people.
Evaluate your current technology
Some of you might think this should be the first topic to discuss around DX and I totally disagree as, based on what I’ve seen, some companies literally collect systems and applications without any clear logic behind. Some of them try really hard to change their customer’s habits and adapt it to their business capabilities driven by their current systems.
Once you understand what value looks like to your customers and how to track and map their journey, you will be able to define what business capabilities you will require to deliver that value in a sustainable and profitable way.
The next challenge would be building the best technology environment optimising your current assets based on your customers needs.
If you want to learn more about DX, please contact us – https://makepositive.com/services/mulesoft/
