According to Gartner “transforming into a (truly) digital business is the number one priority of most organizations. However, a digital business cannot exist without data & analytics. If an organization struggles with digital transformation, perhaps they haven’t given enough thought to data and the potential for valuable insights”.
Over the years we’ve participated in, advised on various data and digital transformations. In doing so, we’ve gained a perspective on just how difficult true data and digital transformation really is and what it takes to succeed.
Success requires bringing together and coordinating talent. Indeed, configuring the right team of technology, data, and process people – with technological depth and breadth, and the ability to work hand-in-hand with the business – together with a strong change leadership may be the single most important step that a company contemplating data and digital transformation can take.
Ranging from the Internet of Things to blockchain, to data lakes, to artificial intelligence, the raw potential of emerging technologies is staggering. Complicating matters, most companies have enormous technical debt — embedded legacy technologies that are difficult to change.
The unfortunate reality is that at many companies today most data is not up to basic standards, and the rigors of transformation require much better data quality and analytics. Transformation almost certainly involves understanding new types of unstructured data massive quantities of data external to your company, leveraging proprietary data, and integrating everything together.
Transformation requires an end-to-end mindset, a rethinking of ways to meet customer needs, a seamless connection of work activities, and the ability to manage across silos going forward. A process orientation - horizontally, across silos, and focused on customers - is a natural fit with these needs to improve existing processes and design new ones, and a strategic sense to know when incremental process improvement insufficient and when radical process reengineering is necessary.
Teamwork, courage, emotional intelligence, and other elements of change management.
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