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Top Reads: 7 Self-Assessment Areas for Digital Transformation and AEM Readiness

Are you in the early stages of undertaking transformative change with your organization? Change can be both exciting and intimidating, depending on your level of preparedness. This is true whether you are adopting an all-in-one experience management system like Adobe Experience Manager or even digitizing paper processes. To help with your preparation, we’ve compiled a fantastic collection of articles in the areas we believe are most critical to a successful transformation.

Strategy

Successfully implementing a large-scale project requires a deep understanding of your ultimate goal and the strategy that will get you there. You must have a clear vision of success, objectives that tie into your overall business objectives, and a realistic understanding of what can be reasonably achieved.

Leadership commitment

No major transformation is a one-person job. Do you know who your key stakeholders are, and are they engaged and committed to the success of the project? Is your project a priority at the highest level of the organization? Do your executives have the skills to lead the company through the change?

Change management

As we’ve said before, change is hard. There’s simply no getting around it. But being realistic about the magnitude of the change and communicating effectively with your team can go long way toward easing the growing pains you are bound to experience.

Organizational alignment

When you think about your organization as a whole, how would you rate its capacity for change? Large-scale projects require an enormous amount of bandwidth, and the attention and coordination of business units across the enterprise. Having the right culture is an important and often overlooked factor.

Business alignment

An effective digital transformation isn’t simply doing things differently; it can fundamentally change the nature of the business itself. When you assess and redesign your business processes, it can call into question some ‘sacred truths’ about your business and operating models, and force you to redefine what it means to deliver value to your customers.

Technology alignment

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of digital transformation is the promise of new capabilities provided by technology. Even skilled IT teams can be pushed to their limit in adopting new tech. It’s important to recognize when outside expertise is needed, and be open to it. CIOs and other tech leaders will need to be both flexible and disciplined to make the project a success.

Risk and security

Nearly any big change comes with some kind of risk. The important thing is being aware of the risks involved and doing what you can to mitigate them. Maintaining the security and integrity of your data has to be a primary concern.

We hope you’ve found the articles above helpful in preparing you for the change you are about to undertake. Ready to assess just how prepared you are?

Download our 21-point readiness assessment here.

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Change Management Disruption Technology

Corporate Innovation: 5 Must-Read Articles

In a previous post, I drew your attention to 5 articles I consider ‘must read’ for anyone interested in digital transformation. In a similar vein, the articles in this post are centered around corporate innovation, i.e. the intrapreneurship that happens in large companies, allowing them to evolve and grow like startups. Below are some recent articles on the topic of corporate innovation that I highly suggest you check out.

PS: interested in keeping up to date via Twitter? Subscribe to our Corporate Innovation Twitter list for thought leaders to follow.

The Business Case Alternative: How to Support Disruptive Innovation at a Large Company

What’s keeping large companies from innovating? After all, they have more resources than most startups can even dream of, and yet they struggle to launch and sustain novel, game-changing projects. As Steve Glaveski points out in this piece, many large firms use metrics that work well for traditional projects, but fail to adequately measure new and innovative ones. He goes on to explain how disruptive ideas differ from incremental improvements, and how big companies can allocate resources to help them flourish. Read more

Confessions of a change agent: How I get Fortune 500 companies out of their ruts

Every company gets ‘stuck’ at some point or another. Even large, successful ones. In this (massive) article for GrowthLab, change agent Thomas Cornwall explains how he helps established companies break out of their ruts and build fresh momentum. It’s a longer read, but absolutely worth it. Read more

Five Principles for Building Corporate Innovation Ecosystems

Tendayi Viki, author of The Corporate Startup, argues that established companies should not try to behave like brand new startups. Instead, they need to create innovation ecosystems, recognizing different areas of the business as distinct business entities, each at a different level of maturity.

“[Established companies] have to be clear that they are not simply searching for cool new ideas. It is the combination of cool new ideas and profitable business models that defines successful innovation.”

In this article, Viki summarizes the five principles from his book that established companies can use to build their innovation ecosystems. Read more

Why Cross-Functional Teams Fail, and How Solver-Teams Sail!

If you’ve ever run a ‘cross-functional’ team project, you know how difficult it can be to get people from different departments to work together to a shared outcome. In this piece by Ajay Shrivastava, he explains how ‘Solver’ teams differ from cross-functional ones, and how you can align those teams within your organization. Read more

10 Powerful Innovation Principles for Market Disruption

These days, companies must innovate if they want to survive. In every industry you can think of, startups in hyper-growth mode are nipping at the heels of incumbents – if not challenging them outright. So how can companies learn to innovate, in order to compete? As Marc Foglino says of this post, “Innovation is hard, but these ten innovation principles might help you to improve your chances of success.” Read more

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Change Management Disruption Technology

How to Get Started with Digital Transformation

We recently published a list of top digital transformation influencers to follow on Twitter. Given the popularity of the post, we reached out to four of the influencers on the list – Kirk Borne, Michael Krigsman, Dion Hinchcliffe and Ronald van Loon – to gain actionable insights into the process of digitally transforming businesses and organizations.

Specifically, we asked them:

What advice would you give to companies and individuals who are interested in pursuing digital transformation, but don’t know where to start?

Here is what they told us.

Three steps to self disruption

Digital transformation is a comfortable way of describing the 4th Industrial Revolution, which corresponds to the current emergent fusion of cyber, physical, and human systems. Any revolution is disruptive. So, think about digital disruption if you are planning to start on this path.

First, you must realize that the pursuit of digital transformation requires changes in mindset, in culture, in strategy, and in your talent model. It doesn’t necessarily require a change in your business goals — after all, your unique contribution in the marketplace should be enhanced and transformed, not necessarily tossed out entirely, unless you are starting an entirely new line of data-informed services and digital products. Digital transformation therefore represents a new (transformative) way of doing things, not simply a new thing to do.

Second, after this realization that you are attempting to surf the wave of a new revolution, then comes the assessment of what are your sources and types of digital signals (data emanating from your customers, your suppliers, your employees, your services, and your products)? Those digital assets are the fuel to bring about your digital transformation. So, what are these digital assets fueling?

They are the fuel for your third step in the digital transformation journey, which is to achieve the business goals that are powered by your digital assets and data products. So, ask yourself what are you focusing on: discovery (e.g., customer segments, emerging trends, fraud, new markets), prediction (predictive analytics), optimization (prescriptive analytics), and/or (my favorite) generating new questions and identifying new context to inform the next best action for your business (cognitive analytics)? Considering that you are seeking to play a part in a major revolution, you should buckle up for some rapid accelerations, re-directions, and new opportunities to enrich your digital transformation journey. 

Kirk D Borne

Dr. Kirk Borne
Principal Data Scientist and Executive Adviser, Booz Allen Hamilton
Twitter
LinkedIn
Corporate

Don’t try to boil the ocean

Digital transformation is a simple and convenient buzzword that often masks the broad, organizational reach associated with genuine evolution and change. The transformation journey must begin with a clear understanding of why we need to change.

Consider questions such as:

  • Is our business model durable?
  • What’s happening in the competitive environment?
  • Have our customers’ expectations of us evolved over time?
  • Is our technology up to date?
  • Do we have the skills necessary to compete in the future?
  • Has our supply chain adapted to the changing environment?

These questions quickly shed light on how far-reaching are the implications of digital transformation. It’s not just about making our website better or becoming more proficient on social media. Genuine digital transformation looks at fundamental questions of business model, revenue streams, and our relationship to customers.

So, consider these questions and conduct an impartial evaluation of where your organization stands in relation to all these core issues. Don’t try to boil the ocean and undertake massive change all at once. Instead, form a team to look at one part of the business and start there.

Consider, for example, how technology can improve customer relationships across your organization or in one division or even department. Then, examine how you can become more responsive to customer needs and implement a pilot project. As with any change, start small and seek quick wins. As leadership develops the strategy, be sure to gain buy-in from everyone involved.

It’s not always easy but it is necessary, and the results will pay off over time as you become more competitive and customers sing your praises and become brand advocates!

Michael Krigsman

Michael Krigsman
Industry analyst, CXOTALK host
Twitter
LinkedIn
Corporate

Digital transformation is a team sport

When starting out on the journey of digital transformation, there’s often a worry about determining the best place to start. Certainly, there are some things that are foundational, such as having a master plan for data management and opening up existing systems better so they can be remixed and integrated into new digital experiences.

But the good news is that digital transformation is a team sport, and so everyone must be enabled to help make the changes required to modernize and rethink the business in digital terms. By tapping into change agents within the organization, leaders can unleash a scalable force for transformation that will create change locally, and if coordinated well, that also fits into the overall strategy.

In this way, organizations can insource the objective of finding good starting points, and better meet the challenge of digital change in terms of assembling the necessary breadth and depth of minds, talent, and resources.

Dion Hinchecliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe
VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research Inc.
Twitter
LinkedIn
Corporate

Move toward data-driven decisions

Businesses need to be able to make live, data-driven decisions through the development of a real-time, modern data and analytics environment. By updating systems and technologies, you can use analytics to better understand your business’s data and share information between teams and departments.

Businesses that want to pursue digital transformation need to get rid of silos that hinder collaboration and effective sharing of data based insights. They must implement digital capabilities within their organization and adapt their infrastructure to effectively accommodate digital transformation. You have to work towards digital maturity, moving from an information foundation to automated, cognitive interaction.

Organizations should start by improving one important customer journey with two to three data sources. Split data collection and application, and start implementing an agile, multi-disciplinary team with the right processes and technologies to create an organizational foundation that supports a digital core. You need a modern infrastructure that’s able to collect data, manage data security, governance, quality, processes, and storage. This gives you the ability to gain insights to look back at historical data, predict in real-time, and define actions live, moving step by step from Descriptive Analytics to Cognitive Analytics.

Ronald Van Loon

Ronald Van Loon
Director, Adversitement
Twitter
LinkedIn
Corporate

Categories
Change Management Disruption Technology

5 Must-read Articles that will Change How You Think of Digital Transformation

Business leaders today face challenges far beyond what their predecessors could have imagined. Industry-wide shifts happen faster than ever, with technology lowering barriers to entry and new competitors being created every day. As such, you need to continuously balance the risks of leading against the risks of following, and falling behind.

But there are some absolutes. Execution remains critically important; human capital, rather than tech, is still the main driver of success.

If you’ve read some of my other posts on the topic, you’ll know I firmly believe that digital change (i.e. self-disruption) is really about organizational change. It’s about leading a group of people to understand the reason for the change, adopt is as their own, and cooperate to make it happen.

Of course, it doesn’t help that “digital transformation” means different things to different people. The terminology itself can be misleading. That said, there are some fascinating perspectives out there, worthy of the attention of anyone seeking to enact change from within their organization. In this post, I’ve compiled a handful of insightful articles on the topic of digital transformation.

Digital Transformation: 5 Essential Elements of Superb Execution

McKinsey performed a statistical analysis on the importance of strong execution during the digital era. If you would like to separate your company from the rest and be among the 50% of businesses that survive digital disruption, this article offers five tips to help you with execution.

10 Barriers to Digital Transformation From an HR Perspective

Today, many companies struggle to keep up with technological innovation. However, in this article, author Barry Lawrence takes a closer look at what surveyed CEOs feel are the top 10 barriers faced by businesses during digital transformation and he believes that HR can help with every one of them.

‘Digital Transformation’ Is a Misnomer

Gerald C Kane has been studying digital transformation and has come to the conclusion that it’s actually not about technology, but about how technology is changing business conditions. This, in turn has changed customer, partner and employee expectations. Fascinating read!

Your Fast Follower Strategy is Riskier Than You Realize

Some businesses believe that when it comes to innovation, the fast follower method is best – but it must be executed correctly. JP Nicols has written a great article which outlines the steps required to achieve success with this approach:

  • having a solid strategy in place,
  • understanding whether innovation comes with exaggerated expectations (hype) or if it has value that will stay with consumers,
  • knowing how much risk company leaders are willing to take, and their methods for establishing next steps.

A CEO’s Guide to Leading Digital Transformation

The role of corporate leaders has become increasingly exaggerated in the wake of digital transformation. In order to succeed, CEOs must be able to keep up with innovation, disruption and rapid change. Authors at the Boston Consulting Group have provided five rules for CEOs to follow in dealing with digital transformation.

Categories
Technology

Engage audiences globally through storytelling, video and language

So much of our business lives in a world dominated by English. While this is ‘efficient’ for the West, it belies a bigger issue around how we can engage and dialogue with people around the world in common issues and causes.

Current technology can bring messages to more and more people, using video to tell stories that can inspire change. The key is to provide content that is localized. Speaking to people in their native language. The ability to do this in a fast and inexpensive way has major implications for how knowledge can be spread and shared to people that need it most.

The use of these capabilities is growing in organizations for training, marketing and communications. This innovation can be leveraged for broader social purposes: health, education, social change, and news. Video can be used more and more to create compelling content that has a message and tells a story.

Storytelling in video form is rapidly becoming the dominant way to market, train, inspire, communicate, educate, entertain about all aspects of a business.  And as evidenced by the explosion of time spent on social media and digital communication, and the desire of all companies to emotionally engage with their customers, employees, stakeholders, suppliers – it is becoming increasingly important to communicate with people in their native languages, instead of in languages they might understand only as a 2nd or 3rd language.

Only 6% of the planet speaks English as a native language, another 19% speak it as a 2nd or 3rd language – meaning 75% of the world does not understand English.  As Nelson Mandela says:

Check out our partner DotSub which helps deliver video storytelling campaigns in any language.

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