| |November 20219Digital transformation of an enterprise is a complete change in the Process, Product or service, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Physical /virtual evidence and productivity/ quality by using digital technologiesme the digital transformation of an enterprise is a com-plete change in the Process, Product or service, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Physical /virtual evidence and productivity/ quality by using digital technolo-gies. Such transformation may be a gradual journey to the envisaged target state for a company over a defined planning period. Evidently neither the digital transformation planning nor the journey is easy. Availability of numerous choices leads to decision impairment and delays. Top up the nu-merous choices with a lack of clarity on the needs and pri-orities. This becomes a sure shot recipe for chaos. This is the state that many CIOs and business leaders find them-selves in. As if, what to transform, how much to transform was not challenging enough, the numerous choice of tech-nologies and platforms, with many more coming and being in different stage of evolution make sure that the CIO's decision making is anything but simple. Not to mentions that while the CIOs often take a technology-first approach and CMOs may be taking a customer experience first approach, as part of an enterprise's digital journey.What could be a simple and common sense approach that may guide one through the chaos. Back to basics, think of intelligently breaking the big problem in small pieces and then solving the smaller ones relatively easily. The Digital transformation journey may be looked on three dimensions with each dimension having three states. These considerations will lead to possible 27 areas of consideration. Depending upon business some of these 3X3X3 combinations may not be relevant and hence may be dropped from solution set after prudent consideration and elimination.Any business with have three set of people considera-tions namely customers, employees and suppliers. Opera-tionally the enterprise may be divided into front end, mid office and back end operations. Digital transformation for an enterprise to envisaged above may be powered by business process transformation, use of new packages or platforms or use of simple new technologies. While use of package/platform e.g. SAP HANA S4C or Oracle or SFDC etc. are easy to envisage just like basic technology e.g. mobility, social media, cloud etc., the process needs some explanation. An enterprise may choose to be any-where on the business process transformation spectrum, from just digitizing its existing business processes to going totally digital native. Let's look at some of these consideration blocks. A cus-tomer may have expectation from an enterprise's front end operations. Let's consider a case where a banking customer who has an issue with his loans payment uses twitter to share his complaint or disappointment. The bank's front end should get to know about the tweet working with its mid and backend and comes out with a resolution. The customer needs to be contacted and suitably handled us-ing suitable technology channel. The above front, mid and back office intelligence comes from altered processes, use of right platform (CRM, ERP, AI and ML) and right chan-nel technology to connect with customer. In a similar way all 27 combinations may be considered for their useful-ness. Based upon these considerations right priorities may be assigned to projects and also right technology selection decision may be made.Having written all the above, let us be clear that digi-tal transformation in reality has less to do with technol-ogy and lot more to do with age old change management. The digital technology implementation is determinis-tic but the organizational change management needs a lot more planning and re-planning, humane touch and exemplary leadership.
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