Digital Transformation Needs to Happen Now
Partners should also have a wealth of expertise outside of technology. Although technology is the enabler in digital transformation, the report suggests that organizations look for partners with strong business viewpoints that can drive success in new areas.
It’s also a good idea to seek out partners with strong ecosystems that keep them in tune with and give them access to emerging technologies. The report cites Deloitte’s DigitalMIX as an effective ecosystem platform that offers unified, personalized experiences across customer engagement channels. DigitalMIX brings together an ecosystem of leading technology providers, including Salesforce.com, Adobe, SAP Hybris, Sprinklr, and a number of other technology vendors across customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, digital marketing, and other business processes.
Also of note for its vast ecosystem mind-set is consulting and technology services provider Infosys, which Forrester hailed for its 2016 investment in Stellaris Venture Partners, a firm with a strong reputation for backing budding entrepreneurs building applications for businesses and consumers in verticals such as financial services, retail, healthcare, and education. “With this investment, we look forward to gaining early access to innovative new companies in India that are inventing the future of enterprises globally,” said Ritika Suri, executive vice president and global head of corporate development and ventures at Infosys, in a statement at the time.
The Forrester report also proposes three ways that companies can enhance their technology teams specifically. The first is to ensure that technology teams have a customer-first mentality. According to the report, this involves training technology teams on customer journey mapping.
Companies will then need to alter their team structures and processes to promote agile methodologies. According to Forrester, these methodologies are empirical, tactical, and iterative; they work with existing tools; they are compatible with overall process improvement strategies; they are focused on the coding process; they fit with the product cycles of web applications; and they work with web-enabled tools.
The report notes that corporate culture and organizational structure can impede development in these methodologies and suggests that executives work to break down those barriers.
Finally, companies will need to get teams working in digital studio environments. According to the report, digital studios promote creativity and collaboration. The report suggests that organizations leverage partners’ spaces or other outside spaces while simultaneously transforming their own spaces.
Although different experts offer different frameworks for approaching the process, they universally agree that digital transformation is necessary for all modern organizations.
“Digital transformation is the process in which a company undergoes a radical change to better meet the expectations and needs of its customers,” says Cahill. He defines this as “fundamentally changing customer- and employee-facing systems; business processes; product and service offerings; and the overall brand” and calls it “a necessity for businesses as the broad adoption of mobile, social, web, and other technologies has created a new generation of customers that expect to get what they want, when they want it, where they want it.”
“It’s about building a company that will be able to survive and thrive as technology continues to shift the landscape for consumers,” Newman adds. “The digitally enabled company is simply more prepared for disruption than those that are grasping to the way things used to be done. Companies that have long histories of profitability are ripe for disruption if they aren’t prepared to change.”
Sullivan agrees. “Do not wait to be disrupted because it will happen. Build a strategy, listen to your people and customers, and fail fast.”
Assistant editor Sam Del Rowe can be reached at sdelrowe@infotoday.com.
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