Accelerated Digital Transformation: What is it — and why do you need to know about it?
Digital Transformation is on the minds of business leaders, more so since the pandemic when demands for innovation shot up by 40%. As demand has grown, so have the tools of the trade matured. Are you using the right tools for the job?
No business can afford to stand still right now. As the Management Consultant Sir John Harvey Jones used to say, “any business not growing is dying”. Much of that growth these days comes from online customers, who spend up to 80% of their buying journey online checking out what options exist to solve their problems.
In 2020, the pandemic led to a sudden escalation in innovation activity within businesses, with IT teams getting swamped by requests. This demand has not all been satisfied. With so many demands being placed on IT, stretched departments must prioritize the most important initiatives, leaving a long tail of demand from business units unresolved.
Does your business need a digital transformation?
Digital Transformation is a catch-all phrase that’s become widely associated with any attempt to adopt digital technology to grow customer value and solve business challenges. In truth, it’s not a particularly useful phrase nowadays for a couple of reasons.
For one, the term digital transformation — meant to be about adopting digital technologies to transform business value and business models — is regularly inappropriately used. Any activity to digitize documents or digitalize processes gets dropped into the classification of being a digital transformation when such improvements have gone on in the same way for years.
Secondly, aggregating all digital initiatives into one catch-all exercise shrouds the whole improvement and innovation game plan in a veil of mystery. In truth, business is generally much simpler than that. It’s about adopting a handful of positive behaviours that drive customer and shareholder value, and then regularly repeating them, whilst constantly looking to iteratively improve — what some people today describe as Marginal Gain Theory, others Rockefeller Habits.
As a consultant, I always recommend that companies set aside big aggregating terms associated with ‘getting stuff done’ — like Digital Transformation, Business Improvement and Marketing — and instead draw up a list of the interventions that have the biggest impact on value to customers and shareholders. Frame your business strategy on a single page, probably using a Balanced Scorecard.
The small things that make the biggest difference to customers
Too often, business leaders develop big hairy ideas to grow customer value, when simpler, affordable, more easily implemented improvements matter more to customers.
Take applications and onboarding processes for example. The high churn rates experienced by some financial services companies on consumer credit applications show how happy customers are to vote with their computer mice when they are presented with one-size-fits-all forms and workflows. We’ve all encountered the ‘silly’ questions that some companies ask us to respond to, knowing full well questions don’t apply to our personal circumstances. Why ask them if they don’t apply?
Digital transformation works best when companies focus on the specifics, particularly the ‘small things’ that customers care about, like the time it takes to pass through an application process.
A new generation of accelerated digital transformation tools
Cloud computing has changed a lot of things in the tech industry. It’s made it cheaper for tech startups to create and scale a business. It’s made user credentials easier to share, integration faster, upgrades easier to roll out, and platform versions simpler to govern. It’s all led to the creation of no-code middleware tools that empower companies to configure not code.
This has led to the evolution of ready-to-use digital transformation platforms that allow companies to focus their effort and resources on shaping technology to do their bidding, rather than build it from scratch.
Actionable digital transformation without coding
PrinSIX is an example of this new evolutionary technology platform that places transformation business technology into the hands of departmental teams, not IT.
The company built on top of the powerful industry-standard building blocks found in the Microsoft Azure platform to create a configurable digital transformation platform.
The PrinSIX ready-to-use DX platform combines six elements to create digital workflows and onboarding solutions:
1. Customer Experience
2. Specialist Journeys
3. Communications
4. Data Services
5. 3rd Party Decisioning
6. Agent and 3rd Party Actions
Adopting an actionable no-code platform accelerates the pace of digital transformation. It means tech teams aren’t faced with the distraction of investing time and money on ‘binding technology together’ only to see if it actually works as a coherent system. Platforms like PrinSIX offer the surety of a proven technology ecosystem. Instead, business stakeholders can immediately start configuring digital transformations that add value and cut unnecessary back-office costs and time-to-market.
Final thoughts — What it means for your digital transformation
For many businesses, the promise of a digital transformation has been more of an ambition than a tangible, realistic objective.
Now, with end-to-end digital transformation platforms coming on stream — that allow businesspeople, not IT, to configure, not code solutions — we’re on the verge of a step-change in the way companies approach digital transformation as a subject.
Ian Tomlin is a seasoned marketer, entrepreneur, and business leader with a 30+ year career at the intersection of strategy, technology, and marketing. As the founder of successful businesses, including Newton Day Ltd, Ian brings a wealth of expertise in guiding companies toward compelling brand stories. Reach out to Ian via LinkedIn to transform your marketing approach and tell your brand story effectively.
