Recently I was at a leading automobile company in Chennai. I was there to meet its CIO. What I found in his cabin was a clean-looking table with not even a single paper but just his laptop on it. Tables of other employees in his office also did not have a single paper on them. He said they had completely digitized their operations. This shows that IT has matured enough to transform a legacy enterprise into a digital one. Digitization is not a journey from paper to paperless. It is beyond that, making enterprises ready to take up future growth journey. Enterprises need to transform the ways in which they do business.
Christopher Paquette, a partner at McKinsey & Company, defines enterprise digitization as, “It’s not just how do you automate some processes in the back office, but it’s about how do you ensure better connectivity with your customers, how do you improve collaboration internally, how do you use data to make better decisions, how do you innovate and advance the thinking within the company?”
According to McKinsey, the digital transformation is allowing companies to quickly virtualize and automate products, services, as well as supply chains to include new disruptive business models and redesigned processes. Digital transformation requires not only digitizing customer touchpoints and entire business processes but also creating new digital revenue streams. In their pursuit of digital transformation, many companies are stuck in their journey.
IDC predicts that by the end of 2019, spending on digital transformation will reach $1.7 trillion worldwide with a growth of 42% from 2017. These numbers show that there is a rat race among enterprises to adapt themselves to the digital age. But are all IT service providers capable of providing digital transformation that is needed by enterprises?
Why some digital strategies work better than others?
It requires deep understanding. Enterprises cannot get into digitization journey without proper assessment and audit of its existing processes and subsequent technology adoption. eMpulse, which has a specialization in enterprise digital transformation, takes up this activity in two phases. The first phase is an operational process consulting led by a competent team. An end to end value stream assessment is conducted to pick the correctly prioritized list of projects. Focused improvement opportunities for Digitization, MIS and BPO generated from multi-layered end to end value stream analysis is done during the assessment. eMpulse will understand the stage of digital transformation process their customers are in, as each customer requires specific areas of expertise, differentiated go-to-market approaches and solution offerings.
The second phase called eMpulse IT delivery engine ensures alignment to business. It is a strong alignment to business processes that allows for IT to ensure high ROI on the implementation of projects. Alignment to organizational needs of the client is given high importance. Technologies that are state of the art and provide a perfect fit for the purpose are deployed in the projects. All manual and legacy processes are retired during this stage. Latest technologies such as IoT, AI and Cloud are deployed at different levels of the organization for agility and seamless integration. A mobile-based comprehensive view of the project progress is enabled for monitoring by the top management.
It is critical for enterprises to understand the specific requirements for business and technology transformation in each of these two stages. They should provide clear requirements to their IT service provider and they need to articulate what goal they are trying to achieve with the digital transformation journey.
Digital transformation is now a business imperative. Think about it. Would you like to learn more about our Digital Transformation Practice? Call us