Too much has been and being said about “how to become a digital organization” lately. It’s interesting to see how limited understanding of what it entails and what needs to be done on the ground, resulting in the failure of many such transformation programs. Terming some automation, some dashboards, or technology changes as digital transformation is not only myopic but also runs the risk of missing out on tailwinds of the industry if not done right and on time.
What should the digital transformation be then??
1. It’s about how you do business (your go-to-market, business models, revenue streams) and yes, how you operate
2. It’s about your people, how digitized are they in their mind; are each of them your digital change agents? is digital adapted as a culture in the organization?
3. It’s about how much effort you put in to acquire a new customer, or serve an existing one… and also about, how much effort a customer put in to learn about you or obtain services from you
4. It’s about your market positioning; are you visible as a next-gen, differentiated organization
5. It’s about your ability to draw partners and the ecosystem to come together drive down the digital journey with you
6. It’s about how you engage your vendors, suppliers, employees, and customers to keep feeding back to the change process
7. It’s about leveraging technology as an enabler to what you intend to achieve; automation, analytics, cloud, IoT…
IT is just one piece of the puzzle and hence, we got to be careful while we define our journey. To become a truly digital organization, it needs that outside-in perspective to define what is right for the organization. The more we take a short-sighted view, the more we get trapped in the vicious cycle of investments and transformation with no results.
Bijuraj Sarangi 
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