Welcome to the Digital Acceleration Newsletter. In this episode, I want to address why it is so difficult to do the first steps, even a Digital Transformation Journey. Click on Subscribe to be notified of new episodes.

Where and How to Start the Digital Acceleration Journey?

Responding to a personal request, I would like to address an interesting topic related to Digital Transformation:

Why is it so difficult to do the first step?

Where and how to start?

If you ask a Consulting Firm about their recommendation on building a Digital Transformation Journey, you will find many common steps in their responses but different priorities and guidelines. Some of the similar steps may include:

Digital Transformation Maturity Grid

Traditional Organization:

The traditional organization typically has all its IT assets confined within a private platform. It may have some cloud deployments, but all these deployments are private clouds as well.

Digital-enabled Organization

Becoming a Digital-enabled organization means that IT has an excellent representation of all Business Processes (IT and non-IT, such as distributed manufacturing) into a Digital Acceleration process. This is typically called having a Digital Twin Model in place.

Digital Leader Organization

Becoming a Digital Leader means that the organization has improved all its processes, so now they can share information in real-time with customers and partners and learn and adapt from those interactions to build additional customer loyalty and long-term profitability.

This transformation journey will include at least two dimensions, pillars, or fronts:

Digital Transformation: working areas

Front-end / Customer-centric

Typically focused on improving User Experience (UX) and opening multiple channels to interact with the extended ecosystem.

Typically, the organization evaluates solutions such as portals, mobile apps, supply-chain delivery options, partner support, customer communities, social media, and branding awareness in this category.

Back-end / Processes-centric:

Typically focused on digesting all the new data and finding new ways of supporting the business.

Topics like Process Automation, Augmented reality, Enhanced Analytics, real-time data processing, hosting models, enterprise architecture, building new tailored services, web 3.0, and Industry 4.0, among others, are typically commented on as part of this.

Business Leaders will often start on one front, but both areas must be addressed:

Organizations with significant interaction with end customers such as Retail, Banking, Business Services, and Telco mobile providers often start with the Front-end approach.

On the other side, Organizations with few customer interactions, such as Discreet Manufacturing and Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), typically begin with a back-end approach.

During my conversation with a subscriber, I got the following feedback:

Jose, I think the final picture looks appealing, but it would be nice to have a bread-crumbs trail (Hansel and Gretel Fairy tale story-like) that any organization can follow to stay in a safe zone while improving the business. Any comment?

Yes, the problem is there is no One-trail-fits-all approach.

But there are some general guidelines everybody can take learn from.

General Guidelines for starting your Digital Acceleration Journey.

I want to take benefit of a recent publication on Harvard Business Review called The Four Pillars of Successful Digital Transformations.

That defines four pillars for a successful digital transformation. I want to comment on the initial pillar called IT Uplift, or what I called before “Becoming a Digital Player.”

What is the IT Uplift pillar?

I want to comment on three initiatives, among others.

1. Identify broken processes and siloed / legacy applications subject to upgrades and/or consolidations.

Identifying and fixing broken processes are not trivial tasks. Sometimes mapping these processes requires a deep understanding of the business and legacy systems with a lack of current documentation.

Therefore, this phase may require important funding to cover documenting processes and upgrading legacy systems. Typically, Business leaders expect a short-term return on investment, but that is not always possible.

The ending goal of this stage is to enable the organization as a digital player and organization capable of interacting in real-time with partners and customers. Still, the complete benefit will become true in future stages.

2. Incorporate new technologies synergistically in your IT footprint so you can validate new business models in your existing processes.

This is related to enabling your customer augmented vision: Mobile Apps, IoT, Blockchain, Supply chain procurement models, Social Media channels, RPA, bots, and Payment Systems (Banking, Crypto Currencies), among others.

It is related to enhancing your Digital infrastructure to become a Digital Player.

3. Improving your business resilience.

Several approaches

Hosting Model:

Many people understand the importance of evaluating different hosting models to improve process continuity and reduce operational costs: from isolated infrastructure to a private cloud to a hybrid cloud.

Security:

Improving your overall Security is another important approach to improving Business Resilience.

Have you realized the security impact of having a vast number of employees working remotely? Let me explain.

(A) Working from Home: Have you realized that the new operational model could include employees connecting to the business using personal devices (BYOD) -and in many cases- from non-secure networks?

How ready is your business to protect Customers’ private information in an event like this? (Privacy rules like HIPPA in Healthcare or personal investment profiles in Banking.

Now it is widespread in the US to have medical meetings virtually.

(B) Hacker Attacks from non-typical devices: How ready are you to protect your business from external attacks perpetrated from devices not controlled by your IT organization? Or mixed environments, where your approved devices coexist with a non-compliant employee router, an IoT home device, or a game console in the same network.

(C) Segmenting your network to protect central IT from Distributed Assets: Imagine that now you have a plethora of industrial IoT devices sensing your manufacturing assets, and one of those IoT is compromised. Are you segmenting your network in a way that these assets are isolated from your Central IT Assets?

Keep it clean:

Once you sanitize your It platform, it is vital to keep it clean by having all your processes correctly mapped and testing your applications in many ways and at different frequencies.

Why is it so important to keep the platform cleanse?

Many exposures were not considered critical in the past because the application defects affected a siloed application. As this will no longer be the case, it is vital to identify and avoid these defects going live and affecting enterprise infrastructure.

How can we early identify and stop these defects?

Many ways, User Acceptance Testing, Regression Testing, and Automatic Testing, among others.

Digital Transformation is a multi-step journey. It is imperative to include a comprehensive set of Application Testing Tools to verify the effectiveness of the changes proposed and the impact on the overall platform, detecting and fixing new “apps-bugs” before impacting the business.

Generally, this is called Application Quality Management (AQM). If you want to know more about this, please let me know. I am glad to assist.

To conclude, I will mention the other three pillars of the Harvard Business Review Report:

Digitizing operations,
Digital marketing, and
Digital businesses.

Each of these pillars focuses on helping you become an Industry Segment Leader.

The complete report is available in the URL provided.

Good enough?

Any thoughts on the subjects raised in this edition of the Digital Acceleration Newsletter?

Please share your thoughts and feedback with the audience in the comments below. Click on Subscribe to be notified of new episodes.