Digital Transformation: Strategy Before Technology

Digital Transformation is not a technical concept. Many have this idea that the very mention of digital transformation connotes technology or technical activities. Digital transformation can simply be described as strategic innovation leadership through people and part powered by technology.

I have come to learn in my years of business automation experience, that digital transformation is more of strategy, leadership and how we manage our people through the transformation part powered by technology. Leadership with a digital mindset is what sets them apart as being good at transforming organizations leveraging technology as opposed to others that simply adopt some technological changes but don’t transform teams and culture within the organization even when they have access to the same resources, it’s that leadership mindset that delivers a successful digital transformation.

The digital mindset leader understands how to identify and plan for a digital transformation initiative, incorporate your transformations into the organization’s corporate strategy and manage communications among stakeholders. Technology can act as an inspiration for transformation, but technology alone, does not translate to transformation, but it sure is an essential part of digital transformation. We can see how the emergence of AI technology has become a major enabler of digital transformation for innovative companies.

 To help us understand the impact of the digital age, let’s look at the Telephone…

Above is the image of the telephone as a kid back in the 80s it was a prized asset in any home back then and was always lock by my parents and we could only receive calls when no adult was home. But the telephone is one invention that changed the world and opened a wide world of communication. Many businesses benefited from the additional communication options that became available after the invention of the telephone. But the uncommon story about the invention is that it started with Alexander Graham Bell researching on using electrical current to send sounds from one place to another which birthed the telegraph and other speech innovations, including sign language and advanced lip-reading techniques. That data and learning gave us the telephone six years later in 1876.

 As communication continued to evolve, businesses benefited from the additional communication channels that are open to making completing business transactions and connecting with customers easier. The number of mobile cellular subscriptions per 100 persons was 1, but according to Statista, the current number of smartphone users in the world today is 3.8 billion, and this means 48.20% of the world’s population owns a smartphone.  The telephone permeates every corner of everything that we are doing and will do. Understanding the history and impact of the telephone in business can give us a greater appreciation of what going digital means today. To simply put, digital transformation is a telephone on steroids.

Digital isn’t something unique, something different, it is the fibre of everything that we are doing and will do. As someone who works daily with software engineers who have years of experience working on enterprise applications, they still beg for guidance and direction to better understand what the business needs. This is usually the missing element in transformations that put technology above strategy. In any digital transformation initiative, I believe strategy is where we create a competitive advantage for the enterprise. People and the culture of innovation are what will sustain it, while technology and communications are how it’s delivered. Since strategy creates a competitive advantage, then it would we need to put in much time and effort into understanding the business problem, the data to support the plan needed to create the innovation.

While many leaders opt to focus on technology instead of strategy, the case for starting with a strategy may be.

1.      Strategy will help stakeholders to understand the opportunity the change would create and how it can be scaled.

2.      Identify and generate data needed to plan and data is needed to sustain the transformation.

3.      Define the kind of innovative culture to sustain it in the long run.

4.      Create a shared language and understanding of the transformation.

The business that can innovate and reinvent themselves are the ones running in the digital economy. However, what we see in the digital transformation world is the stronger narrative pushed by the marketing industry and technology providers that digital transformation is all about technology. The technology alone does not translate into digital transformation. Strategy and leadership are at the core of any successful digital transformation.