What is Digital Transformation all about?

Hello, there my name is Mithun. I'm a technology consultant and I work in the digital transformation space I focus predominantly on things such as agile transformations and introducing agile working and scrum methodologies to development teams and introducing new customer experiences to both the business agents and to your customers.

However, I have a full technology pedigree and I've worked in every aspect of technology transformation within organizations this is just a quick talk on Digital Transformation.

 I was asked recently what is it because it seems to be many things so I'll just take you through my experiences on what digital transformation actually is so ready or not digital transformation is reinventing business as we know it, okay it's not really new it has been around for 40 years, in fact, starting with digitizing information from paper records and moving to consolidate i.t and information systems.

The classic ERP and CRM project and it's now about customer data and customer experience and from here it's also moving into security to improve remote working obviously driven by covid and the collaboration and the next phase of RPA and ai coming down the line now every enterprise even yours now faces a choice between innovation or extinction so fairly strong but it is true for so many organizations that we need to look at it seriously in these terms but it's not as big a challenge as people think now what is it really it's not specifically about i.t or technology it is a business transformation 

However, which is a step-change in an organization it can be about people processes systems or a combination of the three it can affect the whole or just parts of the organization now business transformations are triggered by a range of things it could be emerging acquisition it could be ideobestitor and an exit more likely it's new products and innovation it could be new business models that need to be explored a different strategic focus it could be tackling a bottleneck it could be a footprint consolidation for a business that has spread and now needs to consolidate it might be disaster recovery maybe uh you or a competing organization has been hit severely by a security breach uh or uh some other failure that makes you think.

We need to look again at how to secure technology is it perhaps could be driven by regulator change or a partner change so method 2 or making tax digital gdpr the introduction of secure payments or maybe your largest competitor has now just turned into an amazon copy transformation such as this can also become over time incremental improvements starting as a big program of work and then turning into smaller changes that run on and on so they could be lining politics extensions they could be um yield improvement or they could be the introduction of a new hr resource system it could also be improved benchmarking or just better ai so digital transformation usually starts with technology elements of a business.

It's usually driven by the technology aspect of the business transformation piece but collectively it's about redefining your entire business strategy perhaps even changing your corporate culture to succeed in digital your company will need to think of technology not just in terms of a support function but as a strategic competency a way of getting to your business goals so as I said ready or not digital transformation is reinventing business as we know it it has been doing this for many years but the pace of change has accelerated transformation is not just about applying technology to your business though.

it's about increasing an entirely new business model on the backbone of technology over time your customers your channels and your competitors probably have already gone digital they have increased their technical uh digital capability as of 2017 mobile devices dominated all online searching reading browsing moving away from the desktop that's a pivot point and that has just grown and grown.

we're finding that overtime over 80 percent of us over 90 percent of Indonesia over 70 percent of millennials over 60 of generation x says 40 percent of baby boomers and over 30 of seniors prefer to fight to shop online rather than in-store in businesses 60 of b2b buyers expect the product and vendor products and information to be available on social media as part of their procurement process they expect to be able to access your business platform through mobile and within your own business your products your employees your business operations are becoming more and more dependent on digital technologies either driven by the aspirations of people in the business or your customers or your partners and your competitor's Digital Transformation continues to accelerate though.

But why well the first is that technology is continuing to evolve at an exponential rate and secondly and the new wave I think is that data is much more plentiful and usable so mastering it becomes much more about competitive demand and mastering immersion technology has always made the difference between companies that are competitive and those that are just keeping up or barely keeping up but in today's digital transformation data is the new gold it's not just about the big batches of data but it's becoming more and more about fresh data real-time data by your consumers your competitors your markets and your supply chain having this data knowing how to use it to drive real hard decisions taking your decision making out of the world of opinion and guesswork that is the new differentiator so digital transformation has the potential to level the playing field it has the potential to get you ahead of the competition.

It has the potential if the competition wield it to throw you back into the dark ages so coming back to data data is what makes new business models possible now the core drives at the moment are getting the data protecting the data analyzing the data and then using the data for decision making and that's using cyber security that's using analytics well and that is using your applications well but the data is part of the puzzle for the next phase of digital transformation the new wave of Digital Translation requires that you have more skills in-house to manipulate that data or you can get hold of them through hires or through partnerships with consulting businesses and it's true to say that every organization has a digital strategy of some kind but it's also true to say that the majority of them are unable to complete on that transformation because they don't have the skills and capabilities to execute on the strategy that they built so digitally transforming your organization and succeeding with it transforms everything your corporate strategy your business processes your marketing capabilities and it even impacts the roles and skills that you hold within the company that help you complete your transformation.

So I'm here to help you on the path giving you guidance for the digital economy technologies and practices that are essential for transforming and help you build a team that is on point and becomes the sharpening edge of your digital transformation because digital transformation is not going away anytime soon you may be on the journey for years but it continues to be the driver of plenty of competitive advantages in the industry even now thank you for your time.