As you work to increase your OML, (see part one for a description of OML) you should ask yourself why you want to initiate digital transformation, and what you hope to accomplish with it.
Ask Your Customers
As a rule, you should have an open dialog with your customers. As part of your dialog, you should be discussing their experience with you, and what you can do to improve that.
What are their pain points? If you can understand the challenges of your customers, you can work backwards from there to create a solution. This should be a cornerstone of your digital strategy.
Look At Your Competitors
Are you afraid that your competition will leave you behind? Are you afraid that they will beat you to the punch?
Disruption can come from anywhere. Lessons can be taken from innovative companies in any industry. Any agile and forward thinking company can be a role model to your business. For example, Google famously has a “20% time“, where employees are encouraged to create projects of their own design, that they feel will benefit Google. Famous products that were “20%” projects include AdSense, Google News, and even Gmail. What could a 20% policy do for your company?
Look At Your Company Culture
Your technology needs have to be aligned with your internal culture. The best strategies won’t work if they aren’t supported in your culture.
If your product or service is heavily dependent on technology, and you don’t empower your workers with the tools needed to do the work, then you likely won’t attain your goals. For example, if you have remote workers who connect to an on premise file share over a VPN, but you have frequent network outages or VPN issues, you can expect lower productivity. An online solution like SharePoint Online will likely give a better result.
Use Innovation Hubs
A Tech Innovation Hub is a team who helps identify solutions by addressing pain points. They essentially do the digital thinking for the organization.
Typically, the executive team will set the high level agenda and consider feedback from the Innovation Hub, and then enact changes based on the feedback from the Innovation Hub. The Innovation Hub can examine both internal challenges and customer challenges to help drive innovation. For example, they can exclusively focus on the customer buying experience. They also could focus on back office processes to help increase the speed that quotes are delivered. Both of these examples will help your organization operate more efficiently.
