Why Digital is The Future! How to have a successful journey...
"Digital" and "digitization" or "online" has become a very common word in the recent past due to the C-19 pandemic situation, and yet, the digital transformation has been there in every industry more than two decades or so to create value-driven business opportunities for the organizations in their served customer segments with the right value proposition to fulfill their internal and external customers with amazing customer experiences (CX).
Some basics to know- The average IT spend across all industries was around 8 percent of their revenues as a magic number and yet it depends on many factors like industry, region, and age of the company, etc. Now, think about organizations spending between 4 to 24 percent based on the industry for their IT or digital goals, wherein the staff of IT and CIO or CDO would be bringing seamless and easy to use tools and solutions for the various businesses including sales and markets and other business functions in the company (plus external customers too).
On a side note, usually, companies spend roughly around 10 percent as a magic number on sales and marketing, with a disclaimer that it depends on the size of the company and which sector it belongs to, etc.
With that, it's very imperative that you as a CTO or CDO or CIO or Digital IT Head need to have a very clear plan to create a successful journey towards it with the available budgets in place...
Some of the key caveats for the success of any organization to become truly digital are:
- Make sure to address the five domains of the digital strategy - customers, competition, data, innovation, and value
- Create a comprehensive digital platform with digital products, and not siloed or isolated apps or customizations
- Start with small to focus more on the CX, and then slowly evolve and improvise your design
- How fast you pivot to digital is the clear caveat to bring more efficiencies and value to your businesses and their respective functions
- Have a clear business architecture and enterprise architecture in place whenever your organization do any M&As and adapt as quickly as possible so that all the respective fulfillment happens seamlessly for the existing (for example, legacy apps) and newly acquired customers
- Application and/or software modernization with the latest emerging technologies like microservices, cloud, machine learning, artificial intelligence, monitoring, cybersecurity, etc
- IT architecture is very important to any organization, and yet, that needs to be refined every now and then to meet your business outcomes and demands
- Having an application rationalization chart to know the right sunset and sunrise digital products based on your organization priorities so that it is easier to maintain and innovate faster while the systems and applications are co-existing with newer digital products; a clear winner to achieve improvements in business operations
- Always, treat your data as the biggest asset to your organization to do any sort of transformation and decision making
- Make sure to have highly available, reliable, and accurate data APIs/Services for the key source of truth from the various data stores, these can be called as DaaS (Data as a Service) to ease accessibility and minimize the data issues
- A robust operational backbone is necessary but that certainly is not sufficient for an organization's digital future, an organization needs to adapt to the newer technologies and have to innovate faster to create newer digital products or try to leverage existing newer COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) tools to create newer digital solutions to continue delight and address all of your customer behaviors
- Always, have shared data analytics or insights from the data that you have collected from customers
- Re-use, Re-design, and Re-create wherever and whenever required to save time and money
- Have intelligent automation in place for automating some/many of the most used business processes
- Promote continuous delivery and/or integration with DevOps and SRE (Site reliability engineering) principles, so that feedback loops/cycles are faster and teams can implement and address them in a nimble fashion
- Promote co-creations and co-ownerships with the right internal and external accountability frameworks with faster pace decision making and approvals etc
- "digital" is everyone's job to become truly a digital organization. For example, to have the right business owners or product owners and then create more collaborative and agile ways of working together to reduce risks and dependencies
- Try to create a mindset where the customer is more important than anything, and providing seamless customer experience matters a lot
- Treat your tech debt as an innovation aspect of the digital journey, and have the organizational culture as design thinking instead of leaner thinking to come up with innovative digital solutions
- Having a digital product mindset instead of a project mindset
- Also, an organization can focus mostly on their core foundations and innovation only by having a great powerful external partner and/or developer community who gives you early feedbacks and promote your organization with ever scaling digital platforms
- Have resiliency aspects in your planned mission-critical releases, plan very well for the unplanned occurrences, and have architecture design for the next billion users
References/books:
Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution
Designed for Digital: How to Architect Your Business for Sustained Success (Management on the Cutting Edge)
Why Digital Transformations Fail: The Surprising Disciplines of How to Take Off and Stay Ahead
The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback
https://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Architecture-Strategy-Foundation-Execution/dp/1591398398
https://www.bmc.com/blogs/digital-transformation-books/
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/4-trillion-in-tech-spending-in-2019-heres-where-the-money-is-going.html
https://vtldesign.com/digital-marketing/content-marketing-strategy/percent-of-revenue-spent-on-marketing-sales/
https://www.flexera.com/blog/elo/2020-state-of-tech-spend-it-spending-benchmarks-and-trends/
https://www.flexera.com/blog/industry-trends/it-spending-by-industry/
https://blog.techvera.com/company-it-spend
