Digital Transformation – Framework and Strategies
Published on : Saturday 09-07-2022
Jasbir Singh offers tips for effective digital transformation framework and strategies to derive better business outcomes.
With rapid technological advancement and development of new innovative products, organisations need to understand the requirements for improvement through digital transformation and multiple system upgradation to stay relevant and competitive in the market and business. In the context of business and volatile market expectations, digital transformation is the process of repositioning the business and organisation as a whole in the moving digital economy. By leveraging the new innovative technologies, it maximises the opportunity by consistently providing better service to current and new markets. A digital transformation framework is made to analyse an overall business improvement in order to assist its seamless migration by moving to the digital economy. Digital transformation underlines the importance of the available and continuously generated data. It is based on the digitally stored data powered mechanism to calculate the output on artificial intelligence (AI) based advanced algorithms. This is completely different from traditional data management systems which were more subjective in nature.
Digital transformation is not only the technological upgradation but also about redefining the entire business strategy for achieving the placement in the right market segment. It’s the creation of an appropriate business model for a specific industry, backed by innovative technologies. A digital transformation strategy is used to create a precise method of understanding the issues, its diagnosis, by requisite strategic planning and rule-based implementation, to correctly reposition the business in the current digital economy. The right framework, the digital transformation ensures to achieve a current transformed state of the business as planned earlier to meet the vital parameters, automatically align itself to the current state and focus to extend platform access to develop beyond the currently available technologies. The development system should focus on the value to the customer, market positioning and exceed the competitor’s advantage.
Challenges and its mitigation planning
For business transformation, can the company articulate the final goal? The company needs to develop a framework and optimum model to help/guide them for brainstorming, planning, interdepartmental communications to all stakeholders, innovation and technology selection process.
Digital transformation frameworks are required to accelerate the correct way of functioning of the advanced integrated automation in the current system and its maturity for digital transformation for future needs. Business competition, technology innovations, and regular changes to meet the user expectations drive the market needs.
Digital transformation framework is used to analyse the core strategy of the company and business as whole. It starts from a basic question of ‘what problems are being faced by industries’ and ‘how the industries are trying to solve these problems?’
Steps to generate right information for digital transformation strategy:
1. Internal Current Business analysis for core strategy
a. What problem/issues, companies would like to solve?
b. What is the business forecast for next 5 years?
c. What value can the company create differently than their competition?
2. External business analysis for developing market strategy
a. How to analyse the customer’s behaviour by available data?
b. How large is the current demand of companies’ products or services?
c. What is customers’ intent and loyalty towards their product?
d. How can companies meet customers’ future needs?
3. Business analysis of evaluate competitors for developing market strategy
a. Who are the known competitors?
b. What are the sizes of their business volumes?
c. What reasons are for making them unique?
d. How does the market rank them online?
4. Business analysis to evaluate resources for developing delivery strategy of digital transformation
a. What resources are presently available?
b. How to leverage available resources to achieve what companies need?
c. Understanding the strength of resources, for time, skills and budget, to determine and define the digital transformation journey.
5. Business analysis of evaluate resources for accepting and maintaining digital transformation
a. How do the resources accept the digital-first era for growth?
b. How should an organisation continuously explore improving business processes?
c. How to continuously expand digitalisation by innovation suggested by the team?
d. How to build a strategy for prioritising the change management mindset?
e. Why to accept transformation multiple times to stay relevant and competitive?
These strategic analytic gathered data will help companies to find a niche segment, which they can develop for their own. These strategies are to be used with both historical and predictive data to identify new business opportunities. These are designed to reposition the business in the fast-moving digital economy. It leverages emerging technologies in order to release new products and services that customers favour over the currently available products. These strategies promote rapid innovation and collaboration among production lines and customers. It surfaces the ‘unknowns’ to the internal teams in advance so that it can be solved, and gives the strategic direction to the business.
Having a right digital transformation framework steers the organisation to create the business-wide roadmaps that the executives and employees should refer to being perpetual on the path for achieving the organisational transformation goal.
Common digital transformation frameworks to be formulated:
1. Digitalising the complete business model
2. Automation of the processes
3. Enhancing digital capabilities
4. Customer-centric market approach
5. Innovative thought-process to improve digital work culture, and
6. Collaborative leadership.
Preparation of framework and strategy
The digital transformation strategy framework requires a sincere effort, productive time, and efficient management support. It comprises the total collaboration between the areas of business operational processes, customer experience, and formulated the business models driven by experts’ team. On the developed framework and by following the right model companies can overcome the pitfalls around it.
These aspects focus on and allow companies to meet with different successful improvements.
1. Ensures consistency with better performance and improved efficiency
2. Overall business processes improvement
3. High productivity of employees
4. Seamless communication across all the operation and business units
5. Meeting and exceeding customers’ expectations, and
6. Coherent business strategies.
Digital transformation roadmap
Digital transformation uses big data, cloud computation, APIs, application mobile technologies, IoT and IIoT, artificial intelligence, and use of machine learning.
The strategic framework aims by delivering on defined strategic planning. It guides how to integrate the required digital tools into the current business processes. The company needs an expert facilitator to guide step-by-step through the digitisation process. Companies need to stay equipped with requested resources to adapt to the latest innovative technological soft tools.
Integrate advanced tools for smart system solutions into current digital infrastructure, capture the data, relay it to the cloud, and perform data analysis on a device by using edge and/or fog computing deployments.
a. Digital signal processing
a. Extract, transform and gather load solutions.
Transform the data gathered by smart digital systems into interactive, insightful, and user-friendly designed dashboards. Implement custom interaction interfaces.
a. Real-time data and information visualisation
b. Interactive human machine interfaces
c. Engineering dashboards.
Build prototypes to verify the digital transformation concepts and streamline for the right result before initiating to full-scale development in the business.
Even large organisations consider that they have a mature implementation plan of digital transformation system and further to it also a next level programs are in line, however in reality most are lagging behind. Organisations that reported rolling out of digital transformation at scale sometimes overestimate their implementation progress. Very few have a fully matured implementation planning/programs/framework to properly roll out. It is important for an organisation to understand right scaling while at the developing stage itself to achieve its successful implementation. Selection, scalability, efficiency, and security usability are key elements of these projects. Moreover, companies must deploy the right digital solutions that can monitor data, automate routines, and predict to optimise resources.
Jasbir Singh is an Automation Expert having long experience in Factory Automation, Line Automation, Implementation Strategist, Business Coach, Regular writer on automation, Artificial Intelligence, Robots/Cobots, Digital Technology, Network Communication, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Wireless Communication, Block Chain and use of advance digital technologies. He has established a long association with Business Houses/large production houses to improve factory automation in their production lines as well as productivity improvement in factories in India and overseas; and in advising and designing the units to transform into digital platforms by use of Artificial Intelligence. Email: [email protected]