When we engage in digital transformation projects it’s critical to understand how they go beyond IT implementation or development, or how they differ from product development your companies usually do. There is a way of looking at the concept of digitalization which says it isn’t really anything your company doesn’t do already, or hasn’t done in the past. You’ve introduced new technologies for your employees, or have automated a range of activities and functions which used to require time and resources to do and are now more efficient. If your’e large enough you might even use some technology to manage your customers and gain insight into their activities.
Yet digital transformation goes beyond a lot of this. It’s about more than putting mobile phones or conferencing software in the hands of employees, or automating paper and manufacturing processes. It is at the same time about changing what your business does, not just how you do you business, and about changing who is doing this in your business.
The idea is that embracing digital technology is as much about bringing new types of people into your business, with skills you did not consider important for you company until recently. It is also about recognizing the level of change this will bring to your business models, not just pre-empting disruption, but anticipating it.
We can help with all this, too. We will bring skills to the table which you may not have at the ready, start you on the journey of delivering data and software solutions which you need, but cannot deliver alone yet. We will also help you understand the bigger picture, decide whether you can use data to solve local efficiency problems or should look to more ambitious goals of re-defining your business models.
Digitalisation strategy
How stable and threat resistant is your business today? Is your market position able to withstand attacks from a disruptor? Are there barriers to entry in your space so significant that a disruptor would have to invest more upfront than might be worth it? These are some of the questions you need to think about seriously when deciding what your digitalization strategy should be.
Take everyone’s favorite “let’s think about disruption” exercise, Amazonisation. Could your business be threatened by an Amazon-like company entering your market and competing with you? Amazon is successful at taking what it does very well - distribution - and applying it almost like for like to any space where it is applicable. They didn’t put content generators like music or book publishers out of business, they transformed the distribution model for that content. If you’re a pure play manufacturer this may not only not be a bad thing, it may be something you can and are already using to streamline how you distribute your product. If you’re more vertically integrated this could pose a problem, or perhaps an opportunity to re-think how you do your business today.
Understanding things like these is important to deciding where digital transformation projects will have the greatest impact on your company and we are keen to help you do so.
Facilitated ideation sessions
It is one thing to decide you have a threat or an opportunity you need to do something about, it is another to decide what that something should be. We’ll help you bring together your most thoughtful, contrarian and insightful employees and match them with experts to work through ideating and co-creating solution paths to the problems you want to solve. Using what, by now, are tried and tested approaches to setting up these sessions we will help you to develop a roadmap for your transformation work.
Operations consulting: future readiness scanning
Are you thinking about what new technologies you might need to implement in the business software, data science or employee productivity space? Do you have a vision for what your operation needs to look like in the future and is your technology roadmap aligned to support this? We will develop a future readiness roadmap for your business which looks at what your operation could benefit from in terms of upcoming technologies and what the optimal way would be to adopt and implement them.