Digital transformation - where does it start and where does it end?

As the founder and managing director of 4impact I was recently asked a question that got me thinking, the question was:

“Are we at the start or are we at the end of digital transformation?”

I pondered their position for a bit, and my response was “Well, I'm not sure that's necessarily the right question because how a business starts a transformation is so individually dependent. However, the one commonality is they will truly never really be at the end.”

The start of a transformation for one business may be moving its emails and documents to the cloud (eg: Microsoft 365). For another more digitally mature business, it could be when they started automating their back-office processes.

I think ROI-based digital transformation is about investment into planned and considered phases of transformation, based on your current position and aligned to your short, medium and long-term goals.

What we are seeing now (versus a few years ago) is changing a bit because businesses are finding that what worked for them before the pandemic, is now not working nearly as well.

With many businesses now running a blended mix of work from home, work in office and work remote, it is getting harder to sync up in-person opportunities to workshop a problem, a particular issue, or a process.

Businesses are now more reliant than ever on their systems for both communications and operations.

What is now being observed is that a bunch of those current systems simply don’t work for them anymore, and businesses are now stuck with a level of legacy, disparate data silos and monolithic systems that can’t meet their needs for business agility and pace.

They don't scale, they don't support remote working well, and they don't support remote business and operations.

However, what is needed is the ability to get disparate data from those systems so that genuine data-driven decisions can be made, and that's what is proving to be quite difficult.

Regarding the data challenges that are surfacing, a client recently said to me:

“I don't care about the applications and the systems that I use. Applications come and applications go, but what I do want is an architecture in my business that can support the movement of data and let me get the data I need to make the decisions.”

And I believe that's what we're starting to move towards, being truly data-centered, and data event-driven to make informed strategic decisions at pace and scale.

Businesses do want (and often need) to change out parts of their systems, but it is critical they get value from their data at pace and scale, and that’s generally not about sticking it in a great big vault from which it might take them one, two or three years to both extract and create the accurate insights they need to make strategic decisions.

So, it’s really about how they can more nimbly and agilely get hold of that data, improve its accuracy and trust points, then bring it together and represent it in a way that they can do something with it. Eg: make trusted decisions at pace.

With regards to working with ‘trusted data’, broadly we are finding that once clients start truly accessing their disparate data, they start understanding just how poorly constructed it (anomalies, duplications, misinformation, partial records, missing records) and ultimately, they lack single-source-of-truth trust points.

They need easier and faster ways to bring all of that data together, cleanse and normalize it, then revisit their current systems and rebuild those systems up and down more quickly, more cheaply, and more nimbly so that they can actually make data-driven decisions.

So that's what I think - it's not so much about ‘are we at the start or the end’ of digital transformation, but we are (or should be) more in a phase of data transformation first.

So that's what I'm thinking. What are you thinking? If it's solving your data challenges, then simply reach out for a chat.