Do Digital or Die: The 21st Century Mandate

Most organizations have digital systems that they rely on to support their basic operations, but there is a movement to double down on digital in "The New Digital Era" to differentiate and stay competitive. This means digitizing tactical and strategic actions will also be included in this new push. We are in the middle of a renaissance of the use of technology to create new or modify existing business models. There is a perfect storm brewing that includes shifting global / economic trends, a more digital savvy customer and several waves of emerging technologies. Organizations that stay in their comfort zone and wait to embrace digital might find themselves at a great disadvantage or worse.

Beginners Focus on Customer Experience: 

If your organization is not trying to raise the bar to create a better customer experience with your organization, you are not only shutting yourself off from new revenue opportunities, you are taking a risk that you customer will leave you for another competitor. Enlightened companies are mapping customer journeys from the customers perspective to create new touch points interfaces and processes that reflect the true want and needs of their customers. This plenty of benefits in these efforts and they will buy time for additional efforts to emerge to take on more speed and intelligence. These efforts are enhanced by journey mapping, process discovery and mapping, social, mobile and cloud technologies that offer ways to share maps and surround operational systems with customer pleasing touch points and interfaces on their mobile devices.


Intermediate Types Focus on Increased Speed:

While there can be an increase in overall speed to resolution by focusing on the customer, there is a need for increased speed to recognize emerging patterns, make better decisions and produce better actions and outcomes. These can occur in sub-second time frames in machine driven cases or over a longer period time when human collaboration is necessary to combine diverse skills, knowledge and goals. Not only is there a premium for speed to goals and milestones, there is a premium on speed to change. This ranges to near real time adjustments to explicit rules, goals and flows to speed to the acceptance to change in your internal organization and partners behaviors. These efforts are enhanced by big data, internet of things(IoT), case management,  advanced analytic capabilities and agile methods.


Advanced Types Focus on Optimization with Super-Charged Intelligence:

While happy customers and better speed to market are great outcomes, the competition will not abate without optimizing the efforts needed to deliver condensed knowledge delivered at the point of interface just in time to react or ahead of time to intercept issues before they happen. To be proactive, there may be the need to have responses planned, practiced and waiting in the wings that were created with advanced simulations. To assist knowledge workers to be trained and handle complicated situations, the workers may have to have alternative better practices presented to them that were mined, analyzed and inventoried for contextual application. Perhaps these same knowledge workers or processes will be assisted by cognitive computing agent available in the cloud to ascertain better decisions leading to better actions and outcomes. These efforts are enhanced mining, complex events, poly-analytics, robotics, adaptive case management, agents and cognitive computing.


Net; Net: 

There is no reason why an organization can't have efforts in all three of these categories, but most organizations can't devote the kind of large effort to take on all three at once unless it is focused on a smaller scoped piece of the business. One this is for sure. If your organization is not planning it's transformation to digital, it is at serious risk of great loss. We are at a point in time where maintaining position without change is nearly impossible. It is going to take serious efforts to win against your competition and gain a large mass of lifetime customers.