Mine of The Future:

To move forward with digital transformation by developying digital capabilities is as fundament as it can be a challenge, for reasons mentioned last article. These take time, business understanding, technical expertise of the innovations, its capabilities and limitations as well as human power and concentration. A step-by-step approach may facilitate this process, something we may call Blueprint for digital transformation success. Moreover, companies which as not moving fast towards this directing, lose competitive advantage.

Below you can see the set-by-step to support your company on higher achievements during this process:

1. Map Out Your Digital Transformation Strategy

Evaluate your digital maturity now and set clear targets for the next five years. Prioritise the measures that will bring the most value to your business (SMART KPIs) and make sure these are aligned with your overall business strategy. Companies need the leadership to be ready and willing to champion your approach.

2. Create Pilot Projects

Think big, but start small, with ‘proof-of-concept’ projects. Use them to demonstrate business value and to test and correct your process. Target a confined scope first and highlight the end-to-end concept. Not every project will succeed, but they will all help you to work in a cross-functional and agile approach with customers and technology partners -the new norm of the future. Design pragmatically to compensate for standards or infrastructure that don’t yet exist. Collaborate with digital leaders outside your company, by working with start-ups, universities, or industry organisations to accelerate your digital innovation. With evidence from early successes, you can also gain trust from the organisation and secure funding for a larger rollout.

3. Define The Capabilities You Need

Building on the lessons learned in your pilots, map out in detail what capabilities you need to achieve in your vision. Include how enablers for digital transformation, such as an agile IT infrastructure, can fundamentally improve all of your business processes. Develop strategies for attracting people and improving processes as well as for implementing new technologies. Your success with digital transformation will depend on skills and knowledge.

4. Become Virtuos In Data Analytics

Consider how you can best organise data analytics. Cross-functional expert teams are a good first step. Later, these capabilities can be fully embedded in your company operation. Learn to get value out of data by building direct links to decision-making and intelligent systems design. Use the data to improve products and their use in the field to offer and build new service offerings.

5. Transform Into a Digital Enterprise

Capturing the full potential of digital transformation often requires company-wide transformation. Look to set ‘tone from the top’, with clear leadership, commitment and vision from the C-level and financial stakeholders. Foster a digital culture: many of your employees will need to think and act like digital natives, be willing to experiment new technologies and learn new ways of operating. Support them into this process with content resources and trainings. Change does not stop once you have implemented digital transformation, otherwise you will lose the freshness and will get out-of-date once more. Companies need to keep the reinventing as part of the regular process, at faster rates than in the past to stay in the game.

6. Actively Plan an Ecosystem Approach

Develop complete product and services solutions for your customers. Use partnerships or align with platforms if you cannot develop a complete offering internally. You may find it difficult to share knowledge with other companies, and you may prefer acquisition. However, look for ways to bridge this gap—perhaps with technical standards—so that you can profit from being part of platforms that you do not fully control. Real breakthroughs in performance happen when you actively understand stakeholder’s behaviour and can orchestrate your company’s role within the future ecosystem of partners, suppliers and customers.

This structure is proposed based on the PriceWaterCooper reference and you can read more here.