Digital Change leads to Digital Transformation

Roland Rust | Solution Architect, Digital Transformation Visionary

Quelle: linkedin.com

Ask your customers

Delivering value to your customers starts by finding out what they need and how they need it. Set up an idea lab. Invite customers to participate. Listen to them when they do.

Recently me and my team had to analyse and improve a complex paper and email business process. One participant said, that he was “quite satisfied with the process, but I would like to have immediate updates on my mobile”. Push notifications, that’s what he was talking about. Wow – there wasn’t even a smartphone app existing at that point!

Ask your employees

Your employees know a lot about the needs of your customers. Invite your employees to contribute their ideas as well. You can reward them if you want. The best reward is discussing their ideas.

The same business process involved on-site visits by employees. One of their major problem was to plan their travels. Getting appointments. Calculating the best route. Changing the travel plan ad hoc. Working with seven different applications they somehow managed to plan their travels. On employee said: “technology-wise everything is there. If we only could have a tool with all these features combined!”.

Build up a team

This will be your task force. A good mix of insiders and creatives from outside of your company. Solution Architects. UX-Designers. Data Scientists. Nominate your idea-giving employees.

I have learned a lot in cross-functional teams. Designers, architects and developers get in touch with the real world out there. And employees learn how ideas are transformed into solutions.

Start with doing better

There is nothing wrong with a digital change project which aims to create a better version of the past as long as it has an impact. A customer service portal that really works. A smartphone app for employees which saves them hours by simply giving them access to important company information.

Improve continuously

Once you have something out there that your employees and your customers really like to use, continue asking them about their ideas. Soon enough you will discover that new technologies will help a lot to create useful solutions.

Eventually you will run into a BigData issue. Maybe you need to exploit the blockchain for a specific use case.

That’s where transformation kicks in. Don’t you think?

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