Visual Research is the Future

Last week, Aragon announced that we will be making all of our research notes visual, which means they will all have embedded video. No other research firm is doing this and no one will for quite a while. Why? The short answer is that it’s time intensive. Over the past three years, we’ve spent our time developing and fine-tuning our methodology that allows us to create compelling videos, on-demand. But it took a lot of experimentation to figure out what worked and what didn’t.

Digital Transformation Calls for More than Text Research:

While text documents will never go away, today, the fastest way to learn is through visual content. This is one of the reasons why video is so popular with consumers, and why many enterprises are being inundated with demands from users to support more video. Aragon is responding to this need by introducing Visual Research:

Why Visual Rearch Now?

On Facebook, 100 million hours of video are watched every day, and YouTube has over a billion users, almost one-third of all people on the Internet . Users like video because it’s fun and provides information in an accelerated format, and Visual Research is about just that: learning and absorbing knowledge faster.

The benefits of video learning are numerous. People can process visual images faster than text—in just 13 milliseconds (source: MIT). Traditional text documents need to be read multiple times to burned into memory, but when we watch videos, we 95% of what we saw.

For enterprises the benefits cannot be ignored:

• Increases learner engagement, participation, and satisfaction
• Immediate Recognition: video images are processed 60,000x faster than text
• Visual Recall: up to 80% recall of videos seen in the last 30 days
• Fastest way to learn and recall a complex or new topic

Net; Net:

In the era of Digital Transformation, there is no better time to empower your people to increase their knowledge. Visual Research can help you minimize the learning curve when it comes to competitive insights. Reach out directly to us to see the difference Visual Research will make in your enterprise.

Editor’s Note: Visual Research is a Trademark of Aragon Research.

Pragmatic Digital Skill Building

The ideal for attaining digital transformation is to build digital competencies and skills. While some can write big checks to the large consultancy firms, most organizations want a more affordable and incremental approach to build digital skills that eventually lead to excellent competencies. Let's explore a couple of approaches for developing digital skills incrementally. Before implementing any approach, it is essential to pick digital on ramps or mini digital journeys to target to focus areas of priority for your organization. See research that identifies 32 digital on ramps   Once a focus is selected, there are three helpful approaches.

Focused Outside Hires:

If you are lucky enough to find a digital resource in your area of focus that you can afford, jump at the opportunity. Unfortunately there is a shortage of digital skills and there is dearth of real implementation experience, so this approach as a primary strategy is a luxury at this point in time. Gaining an advantage by hiring young and hungry talent from digitally focused schools will play out in the long haul, however something needs to be done now.

Rent Spot Digital Skills:

While your organization might not want the big bang large consultancy approach, there is no reason not to rent digital skills from consultancies that focus on knowledge transfer; not knowledge hoarding. Finding a consultant that can grow digital skills in your employees while delivering results is ideal. However focusing on results and viral skill building simultaneously might be a bit much.

Building Skills Through Training:

If you can find training, organizations can bring send selected employees out to training or bring trainers in for mass training.  However this approach can be expensive in terms of cash flow and time off the job. Scheduling these skill interventions can be difficult, so self paced learning opportunities are best, if you can find sources. Online learning organizations have digital offerings worthy of investigation.

Net; Net:

Your organizations digital efforts will likely use a combination of all of the three approaches, so the challenge is find the right mix for your choice of digital on ramps or mini-journeys.


Additional Resources:

Digital On Ramps
Skillsoft’s Digital Transformation Learning Solution
Digital Competencies
Digital Skills

Selecting Digital On-Ramps to Accelerate Transformation: An Index to Digital

The discussion surrounding digital has been much more pervasive than complete Digital Transformations. Since transformations are journeys, they take a bit longer than normal projects. While digital has been the buzz for the past five years, “digital doing”—taking tactical steps or smaller journeys in order to attain an emerging digital strategy—will be the emphasis in the near term. Making the leap  Digital On Ramps Here 

The buzz around Digital is strong and it’s clear that digital has significant effects on organizational cultures, organizational competencies, and organizational beliefs and skills over time. While the speed of delivering digital is slower than expected, there are good reasons for it. The protracted rate of change is due in part to a significant number of new and emerging technologies that must be used together to reach the lofty goals of continual customer delight, increasingly effective/efficient business operations with work management, and continuous product/service potentially leading to new business models.

While there are many digital methods, techniques, and technologies that claim to aid in the transformation process, to date, there has not been a clear cut way to classify them and determine at what point in the process they should be used. These digital efforts now have had enough time in implementations to help others identify potential benefits, risks, and companion efforts that help accelerate individual digital implementations that lead to more successful and linked digital journey steps. There is a high likelihood that digital is quickly approaching an inflection point that spells disruption.   32 Digital On Ramps Described and Rated 

Linking Digital On Ramps into Process Focused Journeys:

Register for 3 Key Steps to Aligning Business Processes with Your Digital Transformation Journey by Clicking Here 

Digital Transformation is a journey, and it doesn’t happen overnight. So how do we begin to understand these technologies and align our Business Processes with our Digital Transformation journey? The answer is digital on-ramps – a clear and optimized mapping of technology to meet the specific needs of each unique cases.

Join me and TimelinePI for a live webinar on December 5th, 2017 at 11am EDT to learn how to identify 3 digital on-ramps that can be built on over time on your Digital Transformation journey - while delivering practical benefits now. You’ll also see real-life examples of these on-ramps being put into production by organizations like yours.

Make Proceses Work Harder For You

Processes/Cases are essential to most organizations, but few organizations are tapping them for real digital leverage. We all know that customer journeys are supported by processes that can affect how our customers feel about maintaining their relationship with us over the long haul. We also know that processes are ripe for operational improvements. Is your organization taking the right steps to leverage processes in your digital journey?  We think it would help your organization attend a free webinar on process scheduled for December 5th that will help you manage processes better by measuring actual results. Your organization needs to manage work better with processes.

Register for 3 Key Steps to Aligning Business Processes with Your Digital Transformation Journey by Clicking Here 

Digital Transformation is a journey, and it doesn’t happen overnight. The problem is that, while there are many technologies that claim to aid in the transformation process there has been no clear methodology for classifying them and at what point in the process they should be used. Without this understanding, organizations with even the best intentions can end up wasting significant amounts of time and resources applying these potential solutions in suboptimal ways often preventing them from ever achieving real transformation.

So how do we begin to understand these technologies and align our Business Processes with our Digital Transformation journey? The answer is digital on-ramps – a clear and optimized mapping of technology to meet the specific needs of each unique cases. Join me and TimelinePI for a live webinar on December 5th, 2017 at 11am EDT to learn how to identify 3 digital on-ramps that can be built on over time on your Digital Transformation journey - while delivering practical benefits now. You’ll also see real-life examples of these on-ramps being put into production by organizations like yours.

The Three Most Common Approaches to Digital Transformation

While most organizations approaches to digital are multi-faced, we have identified three basic approaches to Digital Transformation. The dominant approach in any organization will tie to the organizations culture and current powers in charge in an organization. 

 I.                    Wait for Proof of Digital Success:

This approach exercises a skeptical eye towards digital efforts or placates change adverse cultures. This approach will help organizations that are focused on empirical results who are risk adverse in nature. The problem with this approach is that there is a large risk in doing nothing when digital catches fire and digital journey success enables competitors to distance themselves and accelerate fast. This approach is a large bet against digital transformation.  Since most organizations will have a hybrid of digital and non-digital solutions eventually, this approach seems to be weak.

II.                     Develop a Holistic Digital Strategy:

This approach concentrates on getting the strategy right and as complete as possible up front. This requires a bold long term orientation that counteracts short term financial performance. This approach concentrates on changing the culture and implementing change in a rapid and agile fashion. This requires and appetite for risk and great patience. This approach is usually quite expensive and assumes that the target is more stable. There are some key stable activities that make sense to target and communicate, but there are dangers.

III .                 Exercise Digital Dexterity Utilizing Incremental Delivery:

This approach concentrates on delivering benefits along the way to a potential changing digital destination. While some an initial target is identified and a possible route to the target is selected, lessons-learned and new inputs are considered to alter the target and path to the destination can change. This leverages on-ramps in an exploitative fashion and build / morphs into an overall journey or sets of journeys. Organizations are encouraged to have a solid, but mold able strategy that will not be perfect at the start, but will evolve with industry and organizational lessons-learned. Competencies and skills will evolve and create a new digital culture. 

Net; Net: 

Most organizations will have folks that will try to represent each of these approaches. It is dangerous to develop a holistic approach until there is a base of competencies, skills and experiences related to digital, but it a more dangerous to not have consistent executive strategy for digital.