siliconindia | | December - January8IN MYOPINIONBy Murali Bandaru, EVP/Chief Information & Digital Officer, American Tire DistributorsWhile Digital Transformation might have been seen as cliché or buzzword before COVID-19, its importance is quite evident in post pandemic world. Many businesses across the world quickly implemented Digital Transformation to survive the events brought on by COVID-19. Every few years Information Technology reaches an inflection point where some of the experimental technologies start to become mainstream and commercially viable and available. This phenomenon creates interesting opportunities for various industries to either create new revenue channels and/or generate operational efficiency at a different level. Benefits of Digital TransformationLike any other transformation process, if we understand the key components and the overall process, Digital Transformation can be extremely powerful, liberating, and even life changing for an organization. At the same time, it is also easy to fall for the buzzword nature and optics of Digital Transformation and make it nothing but window dressing. A successful Digital Transformation not only enhances key foundational technical capabilities, but it also increases an organization's ability to deliver key customer-facing functionality and best customer experience with high speed to market in an agile fashion. I spent almost 20 years building eCommerce capabilities for organizations in a "Direct to Consumer" department store retail industry and essentially supporting organizations through that inflection point. We can broadly categorize any Transformation across the following three areas and in this order of importance:- People & Culture- Technology- ProcessPeople & CultureAn organization's most important assets are people. No transformation, digital or otherwise, can happen without transforming people and culture. As more revenue continues to originate through digital touch points and channels, it is extremely important for people and culture of an organization to change accordingly. While as customers themselves, people experience and expect this change in their day-to-day interactions with other companies, most people seem to struggle to adapt to such a change in their day-to-day work life. Some of it can be attributed to usual `resistance to change' from purely a human angle and the rest of it can be explained by the fact that legacy ways of doing things did bring success over the years so why change a winning formula, right?Digital businesses require different level of agility, speed to market, and solution mindset from people working for these businesses. It is extremely important to build awareness of these concepts with people so that they can understand why these are important and how this impacts the organization. Agility is the capability of an organization to adapt to and make the most of the changes in the business environment, and overall macroeconomic trends. As the pace of change in digital businesses is much higher, an organization's ability to deliver business capabilities and solutions to meet that pace of change defines speed to market. Solution mindset is a key cultural component that can accelerate an organization's Digital Transformation. It is a subtle change in mindset that takes the phrase "these are the constraints as to why something cannot be done or accomplished" and flips it on its head to "what do we need to do and how do we eliminate the constraints to make something happen." Just imagine if every associate in an organization adopted this mindset and the transformational power that it could bring to an organization.Technology:We can categorize the technology items into two key categories. Foundational, capabilities that are core to support agile delivery and speed to market expectations of digital businesses, and key technology trends that take an organization to a higher level of digital maturity.DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ­ A PERSPECTIVE
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