Digital Transformation: Decoding the Transition from B2B to H2H Experience

Digital Transformation has become one of the hottest ‘buzz words’ of today.  And why not, when we discover even baby products manufacturers and renowned accounting firms are heavily betting on it. The increasing internet and mobile penetration has led to a digital disruption and none of the industries had remained untouched with this new digital wave. The credit goes to ground breaking technological advancements and government initiatives which had made affordable technology accessible to the masses across the remotest areas of the planet.

Technology has evolved massively in the past decade while trending towards a new one taking birth every day with the first rays of sunlight. Many of them appear to be promising to find a crucial place in our life as suggested by the statistics below.

Industries across all segments are expressing immense confidence in these technologies and are heavily investing in them to achieve the desired insights and results. The fact cannot be denied that these technologies are actually making a significant impact on us by making things convenient and life in general easier.

But, a strange thing to watch in this Digital Transformation wave is the organizations’ perspective. Most organizations appear to be focused more around the term ‘Digital’ instead of Transformation which stresses a strong affinity towards technology.  The focus is on making humans tech savvy resulting in a new generation who are both technology dependent and data hungry.

The term ‘Transformation’ appears to have been left mid-way which has resulted in a rise of humanoids lacking human values and common sense!

Did we really mean to create such of world where technology takes over us and our values?

Digital Transformation isn’t limited to technological advancement, but has a much wider scope of deliver. The transition from Gen X to Y and now Z is heading towards redefining the principles of doing business. In order to adopt and adapt to these principles, it requires an enterprise wide agile transformation. The world is transitioning from an independent individual country setup to a collaborative cultures constituting into a connected planet of 7.5 billion headcount. A person in an office might be an employee, but outside the premises could be a customer or a potential business opportunity.

Here are some thoughts for consideration to be used as building blocks for organization transformation strategies, to create a collaborative and sustainable digital transformation ecosystem and the transition towards a human2human (H2H) model.

·        Business agility: It should be at the heart of any business as agile is a culture in itself. Organizations need to contemplate adopting it at across levels and not consider agile as a methodology limited to a small software development group. Focusing on time to value, low latency, rapid adaptation, innovation, mobility and flexibility are some of its key components.

·        Flat Hierarchy: Moving away from traditional hierarchical organizational models to flat hierarchy of small self-organizing teams. Promoting Intrapreneurship within organization would deliver impressive results and enhance engagement.

·        Bureaucracy: A major roadblock in smooth functioning of any organization and should end with immediate effect. Granting optimum authority and autonomy to individuals at all levels to take wise decisions depending on their responsibilities as they tend to possess maximum ground level visibility of their deliverables than anyone else.

·        Agile leadership: The executive management should be educated and open minded enough to accept the disruptive changes and showcase leadership qualities in taking risks which consequently generates confidence in the teams on ground.

·        KPI’s: Moving away from the traditional KPI’s and focusing on introduction of a new set of indicators like employee happiness index, customer delight score, business health index etc. to maintain a balance between employee engagement and customer satisfaction.

·        Communication has to be as much open, simple, consistent and transparent to ensure the audience at all levels remains connected and updated with the right information.

·        Unified vision is another factor which requires implementation from day 1. Organization leadership should ensure to remain synchronized in terms of vision, mission and goals across all levels.

·        Collaboration is the key to business success. Organizations must be open enough to collaborate internally and externally at all levels in order to achieve their vision and deliver on customer expectations.

·        Security is a major challenge organizations are struggling in today’s big data world. There is a need of an equal effort both from organizations to ensure right security systems are in place to ensure customer data remains encrypted and from customers to keep themselves aware of various security hacks.

Digital Transformation is about connecting the right DOTS (Digital, Operations, Technology and Strategy) while ensuring people, process and system remains minimal affected by the change. Technologies, tools and automation constitutes to be a critical enabler in easing the overall digital journey, but primarily it emphasises on connecting and collaborating with the right resources to further enhance the human H2H experience.

In today’s world of Industry 4.0, Business 4.0 and HR 3.0, organizations should be building a transformation ecosystem comprising a perfect mix of communities (technology, consulting, operations and leadership) flexible enough of adapting to any size or scale with the purpose of accommodating the dynamically changing customer’s expectations. Imagine a world where all the big enterprises collaborate with the SMEs and startup’s globally to create a refined and centralized ecosystem of products and services by working, delivering and celebrating the success all together.

Organizations across the planet are aspiring hard to achieve a successful digital transformation and working tirelessly to lay the finest foundation stones for their journey. This is the right moment for them to assess if they are actually heading in the right direction and avoid this disruption turn into a disaster!

Thoughts are personal, views are welcome!

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