For all that’s already been said about digital transformation, it’s surprising to see that a major reason these initiatives still fall short – which according to BCG is the case for a staggering 70 percent – it is because organisations digitalise, but forget to transform. Transformation can mean many things, each of which will be unique to the business, but somewhere on the wish-list will be words like “optimise” and phrases such as “create value”. Pitfalls are around every corner. Failure to centralise business objectives, frameworks, plans, and mission statements can mean falling prey to the allure of the latest and greatest technologies just to ensure your company is on the digitalisation bandwagon.
So, just for a moment, let’s forget what’s new in the world of technology; let’s put aside budgets; let’s ignore what the competition is doing. Let’s examine ourselves. Let’s sketch out a problem framework with operational transformation at its core – ideally reaching across various departments to eliminate those dreaded silos we keep hearing about. You know the ones – they are frequently blamed for the breakdown of the digital transformation bus.
In technology, we often think in layers. And as it turns out, we can bring a layered model to the digital transformation drawing-board. Our layered model will make it a lot easier to focus on the basics of business and map out a manageable route to ROI that works for our own organisation. From then on, we will digitalise, optimise, and transform by applying a six-layer construct to everything we do, condensing a dizzying array of needs, goals, proposals, analyses, and restraints into a roadmap that all stakeholders can get behind.
The region’s FSI sector is among the most prodigious when it comes to digitalisation, so let’s consider a bank for a moment. And let’s imagine a loan-origination process in that bank. Such a workflow weaves through multiple departments – customer service, relationship management, underwriting, and more. In Silo City, any digitalisation project undertaken by any of these business units may not be able to deal with the data arriving from another link in the work-chain. But in Layer Land, we define the workflow as a holistic solution across departments. And we do it using our newly established six-layer transformation approach.
1. Data
This layer gives security, integrity, and scalability for our business’s core information. Each of these deliverables will be achieved differently for every organisation, but they must be achieved. In our FSI case study, we would digitalise by holding account data in a database rather than spreadsheets; we would optimise by maintaining a single source of truth for all departments and speeding up document retrieval; and we would transform by indexing data for even faster retrieval, and using advanced OCR to assimilate unstructured data and expose it through APIs.
2. Systems and applications
Automation and the democratisation of data access occurs here. Digitalisation involves giving access to basic data operations and creating dashboards to serve different systems and applications. Optimisation would call for the provision of efficiency-enhancing middleware for authentication, exception handling, and the standardisation of data operations. And transformation could introduce microservices via a cloud ecosystem.
3. Processes
To be clear, this is about business processes. We digitise our workflows by routing work without human intervention and pre-filling data into forms where possible. We then optimise by implementing notifications and SLAs for productivity, and reports and dashboards for visibility. To transform, we deploy process-mining tools that suggest further optimisation opportunities.
4. Experience
This about employees and customers equally. The digitisation of paper into data (or online loan applications, to return to our banking example) is obvious, but in downstream processing we can also use the modern communications tools preferred by today’s users, rather than email and voice. To optimise, we turn to portal-based dashboards that display the real-time status of applications, thereby reducing call volumes. And transformation could extend those status-checking capabilities to SMS push notifications and granting RMs the capability of loan approval via mobile app.
5. Collaboration
Teams become more effective when we digitalise their interaction through communication tools and shared-content repositories. We optimise their experiences through holistic collaboration tools that allow them to share content and create and manage projects more easily. And for transformation, how about integrating those collaboration capabilities with admin and shared services to do things like autogenerate support tickets from a Slack chat?
6. Intelligence
Insights from data come in different forms for different businesses. For our GCC bank, digitalisation will allow AI-powered systems to be fed the right data because continuous auditing and standardisation will have ensured quality, integrity, and compliance. The bank will optimise through AI models that (for example) suggest follow-up actions for enhanced customer care based on clean historical data. And it will transform by integrating the AI model with risk and data-loss prevention systems to get ahead of the curve on compliance risks.
The golden rule
Define use cases clearly before investment. It is the golden rule of digital transformation, and the six-layer journey model helps organisations to follow it. Business leaders who are familiar with the layers will have more to say on the direction of the journey. This is as it should be because successful digital transformation is a business-oriented endeavour.
The layered approach aligns core business functions, which leads to better coordination, greater value added and higher ROI from any technology procurements. Unified platforms, for example, can often be valuable ways of addressing multiple use cases in a single layer.
So many digital transformation programmes crash and burn from having no business-oriented plan in place or sticking to traditional silos or simply buying technology because of its dazzling bells and whistles. I started by asking you to forget some things. I shall leave you with a single entreaty to remember – remember to look inward and think in layers. Go step by step and reap the rewards of digital transformation.
