digital transformation

There is a common fear amongst employees in service industries like food & beverage that the increased effort for automation through machines will ultimately replace workers and dehumanize what is usually deemed a “people-focused” industry.

The fear stems largely from operational and logistical automation, where we are increasingly seeing robots take over responsibilities like optimizing production rate in a food factory, quality assurance checks and even customer-facing service roles.

How do you make the most risk-averse decisions for your technology investments when your day-to-day duties mean your knowledge, time and resources are over-stretched?

Each year meticulously analyse the cyber industry and their detailed “Cyber Security Landscape” graphic below is a perfect example of why SMBs can feel overwhelmed when it comes to making technology decisions for their business.

The High-street is going through a tough period. We are moving from an analogue world to a digital world. If you sell clothes, food or other commodity products on the high-street and you are being threatened by the digital world, what can you do?

1) Don't try to be a better Amazon

Clouds are those blurred masses of condensed watery vapor floating in the sky whose gloomy nature often leads to questionings around their true physical state. Are they really tangible? Could we touch what we look up to? And above all, is there a difference between what we imagine seeing and what they truly are?

Technology has changed pretty much everything in the modern business world, but how can it transform the customer experience, productivity and efficiency at work? While it’s true that HR processes are still very manual, document-driven and ripe for digitalisation, to transform them is often more complex than other business unit processes within your organisation.

Here are some lessons for anybody wanting to do digital transformation based on positive experiences:

Differentiate between digital and innovation

Digital teams do sprints, have product owners & scrum masters, use Cloud Computing, AI, continuous deployment, etc. Innovation teams do the same. However very few companies have both and make sure they compete and collaborate at the same time.

“Transformation” is the buzzword of the day.  Agile Transformation. Digital Transformation.  HR Transformation. But what does “Transformation” really mean?

Source: Dictionary.com

‘We need to get more digital’ is the cry from many a board room. Often followed by the question ‘what does that mean?’

If this is only just happening in your board room, then that cry may well be coming from a fear of being left behind by the competition. Disruption in established markets takes no prisoners. Scale is no defence, and can actually be your greatest enemy unless you leverage the resource availability that scale can offer.

So, the digital battle cry has gone out and what happens next is usually one of two things:

In anything but name, data is today’s most used currency.

In the current business paradigm, structured by big tech firms over a decade ago and replicated since by a number of online platforms, individuals willingly provide their personal information in exchange for a service. Personal data is subsequently repackaged – anonymised or not – and sold to advertisers and marketers.

A few years ago I was asked to explain IT modernisation to a main board Director in a couple of minutes. I created a "Killer Slide" (see a previous article) which worked well and has been "borrowed" by lots of people since then.

So I've updated the slide to reflect the digital times we live in and thought I'd throw it out there in case it's of interest and use.