Are Your Technology Plans Ambitious Enough?

Many organisations, including our own government, claim they are pursuing digital transformation strategies across multiple departments. Most are not.

In the main, the majority of digital transformation projects are focussed on digitising an existing process. Creating an online form instead of capturing data on a piece of paper is hardly transformative.

Chatbots are replacing people and AI is being used to give people better answers but this is not delivering operational efficiency at scale. We need to think bigger. We need to stop trying to fit the processes of the past into how we use technology in the future.

If businesses want to radically improve customer experience, drive operational efficiency and create new revenue streams then they need to think bigger and more broadly.

Transformative change comes from leaders who are open to new ideas and fresh thinking. Look at Microsoft. They recently joined Apple and Amazon in the $1 trillion club. This only happened because they stopped focussing on Windows and gave people products they wanted on the devices they were using.

Delivering 10% efficiencies by streamlining a few processes may keep you in the game but they won’t provide the significant competitive advantage required to truly scale your business both in terms of size and profitability.

When businesses start thinking about their primary strategic objectives they also need to look at how technology will impact on how the strategy is executed.

A digital transformation strategy should map out the journey from being a traditional business to being a digital-by-instinct business.

During this process you will have to re-think how the business operates at all levels. It will affect how you collect and analyse data. It will impact on how you engage with customers and staff. In truth, it will change the culture of the business and how it communicates what value it can offer the market.

Technology won’t replace business leaders but technology aware leaders will replace those who are not.

This piece was written by Peter Kerr of Auxin Services.

If this resonates with you and you’d like to up your game, you may be interested in the upcoming workshops that Peter is delivering for us.

We are running two intensive workshops, one for digital businesses in June and one for traditionally non-digital businesses in July.

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