I am always asked about the best approach for digital transformation. From my experience, I can warrant that every company is different. It has its specific challenges, its legacy, and its opportunities. That's why there is no one-size-fits-all approach. I advise to take an approach tailored to your business and most importantly that aligns with the company's strategy and its operating environment. What do you think?

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That’s correct, best approach should be adopting an inclusive, participative approach with all participants are totally aligned to get best results.

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Digital transformation should be approached the same way as any new project. Identify the business problem to be solved, map out the current and future states, and identify the path to get to the future. Implement/change business processes and evaluated technology where appropriate. If everyone is clear on the problem to be solved it’s a lot easier to get everyone pulling in the same direction and have success. If you start witty the solution (“digital transformation”) you’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall.

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Indeed, I would add to do a thorough analysis of the weaknesses your business has if the digital transformation would not take place in a medium term, with it you and your team can focus on the most important & relevant process to be digitalized first.

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Well summarized, can’t agree more. Any Product or Service that cannot be adjusted or tailor-made according to the business need, soon or later, will be out from the race for sure. Every industry have seen such cases in the recent past.

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This is an interesting one. There is something different about organizations, but the strategies, techniques, and tools to support and foster digital transformation rhyme. There are approaches to accelerate innovation that are cornerstones across companies. This is where the value of advisors, analysts, and technology partners are super sized in value.

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I think that too many things get lumped together and some important things get left out of DT. For example, where does digital adoption fit in? I have yet to see a DT initiative where there is a workstream fully dedicated to Digital Adoption. And I don't mean just training people to use the new technologies, but managing it through the lifecycle of the IT product. Making technology people savvy, measuring adoption and usage trends, putting help content in the application and making sure that it is being used as designed. We need to go well beyond the implementation of software.

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Agreed - there should be a customized digital transformation roadmap for your organization that aligns with your overall vision, mission, and company values/culture. It should assess your current state and set goals and deliverables according to your resources, budget, leadership buy-in, etc. This is definitely not appropriate for a one-fits-all approach. However, it is possible to utilize a strategy plan or roadmap template as a starting point and customize it while embarking on the assessment and evaluation process.

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Agree that there is no one-size-fits all, but I do think that there is a methodology and approach that all companies can follow for a transformational project. Having that standard project management (and change management!) framework of the key objectives, desired outcomes, expected results, stakeholders, communication plan, timelines, etc., etc., is critical.

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True observations. Besides the points raised already, it is also depending on the Vertical industry and the role that you want to play.

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So many factors could influence the outcome of a digital transformation initiative.
Only to name a few:
- Existing applications stack (obsolete legacy applications or modern applications)
- Degree of workflow/process automation (does it require a lot of manual interventions)
- Targeted audience (customers or employees readiness to accept the change)
- Volume of transactions/operations (is it significant enough, very low or very high)
- How critical is the process to be transformed
- Was the process optimized, slim-downed and masterized (people understand it)

I've seen so many tries to digitize a process where the above factors were 'red'. The results were always disapointing. Sometime, we had to hire 50 people for backoffice operations because we add a new function on the mobile but never thought about the end-to-end. It ended up in a queue to be processed manually. That's not a right digital transformation approach.

Regards,

Steve

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