“Digital transformation is the fundamental rewiring of how an organization operates.”
–What is Digital Transformation by McKinsey
Digital Transformation is an ability to change and improve the work process for the organization to reduce friction, make things efficient, generate higher revenue improve gross margin. It could mean different things for different companies or even departments.
Few weeks back I was talking to a friend of mine, it was a refreshing conversion. We connected through LinkedIn, thought of connecting through phone to exchange thoughts, considering both of us worked in the same field of #DigitalTransformation.
During the conversation, we realised the area of digital transformation for him and his organization was totally different than what I am focusing on. This is pretty much normal, when it comes to interpreting Digital Transformation and its scope in an organization.
So many questions, lets just start with a Deep Dive in to what are the key areas of Digital Transformation.
Here are the key pillars for Digital Transformation Strategy in any organization. I am calling out the key areas which are essentially reflecting across the organisations by size and capabilities.
Customer experience has been one of the key focus areas in the Digital Strategy of the organization. Some of the key capabilities under consumer experience are –
The Digital Transformation Strategy for this vertical has gone through major revolution in 2023. With emergence of ChatGPT and Gen AI, the chatbots have gone through major transformation, now they are more personalised and interactive.
Industry 4.0 is a broad area, applicable to Manufacturing and supply chain. Various capabilities applicable will differ by company, its maturity in digital curve. If the organization is digitally mature the discussion for Industry 4.0, could start with how the data is to be used for Business intelligence, realtime visibility, machine learning and predictive maintenance.
Some of the advance capabilities like supply chain control tower and visibility help the companies drive significant competitive advantage.
Robotics, RPA, are another set of areas supporting the Manufacturing organizations to drive the productivity impact.
The Digital Marketing is one of the key areas for organization to drive growth, acquire new users, engage existing users etc.
Customer acquisition via performance marketing, email lead generation, emails for lifecycle marketing. Consider omnichannel approaches for customer reach and interactions via multiple channels of customer care. These elements illustrate how digital marketing is integral to transforming traditional marketing approaches into more targeted, analytics-driven, and interactive experiences.
The specific digital marketing mix can differ significantly between organizations depending on their industry, target audience, and strategic goals.
For instance, a startup focusing on direct-to-consumer products might heavily invest in social media and content strategy to build brand awareness and engage with a broad audience. In contrast, a B2B company might prioritize email marketing and outbound calling to generate leads and establish direct relationships with potential clients.
Majority of the companies are now either already using or exploring the use of AI. According to Anthony Cardillo on explodingtopics.com
“Over 77% of companies are either using or exploring the use of AI.”
This primarily means the adoption of AI has grown significantly, as compared to last decade. With the willingness to adopt AI, the big data and Cloud adoption comes up automatically. Most of the companies, would have some elements of data, AI and cloud adoption.
For companies to adopt and use AI, they need to have solid big data strategy, and cloud strategy. Cloud is enabling the speed of adoption at much faster pace.
In early last decade, most of the struggle for AI development used to be around how do you allocate high performance computing (HPC) resources for your model training. The model training which used to take hours and days, can now be done in seconds and minutes. The cloud infrastructure is much scalable to address the demand for training of the models, or inferring insights to run the business.
The adoption strategies for Cloud, AI and big data technologies could differ dramatically depending on what companies are doing, what is their end goal and where are they in their journey.
e.g. few companies who are predominantly are on premise infrastructure and have not started their journey, might just start with migration of on-premise data to cloud, and create a data warehouse/lake.
The Digitally matured organization might have already established cloud architecture and would have implemented microservices architecture. They would have data warehouse. They might already be using the some of the business intelligence tools for visualization.
Organizations in transform zone, which are digitally matured, who started their data transformation journey few years back, their focus might be how to develop, deploy, and maintain the existing and new models. Some of the platforms and tools which would support their journey in ML Ops to develop, deploy and maintain the AI models, operate more efficiently.
When you hear,”I am leading Digital Transformation in my organization!”, now your next question should be, tell me more, which area of Digital Transformation?
We have discussed some of the most important and key verticals through which an organization can move forward their Digital Transformation Strategy.
This article is written by Amit Kurhekar, Head of Data and AI Solutions.
#TransformTechX
