As If the non-digital businesses needed any more incentive, the COVID pandemic is here.
All businesses must go digital.
Connected devices flourish today – 30 billion IoT endpoints are available today and will reach 80 Billion + by 2025.
Digital businesses that are already blurring the physical and digital worlds are a time-sensitive critical paradigm creating competitive advantage through new offerings, new business models, new customer experiences, all enabled by agile relationships.
According to IDG as part of its 2019 digital business surveys reports key findings. Decision-makers across 700+ companies were surveyed, each with an employee size of 14,000 or more.
- 95% of start-ups have digital business plans compared to 87% of traditional enterprises that were founded 50 years ago or later
- 55% of start-ups have already adopted a digital business strategy compared to 38% of traditional enterprises.
- 62% say delivering an excellent customer experience as measured by customer satisfaction scores defines success as a digital-first business.
- Start-ups can increase revenue by 34% relying on digital-first strategies; other enterprises increase revenue by 23%.
- Big Data/Analytics (58%), mobile technologies (59%), private cloud (53%), public cloud (45%), and APIs and embeddable technologies (40%) are the top five technologies already under mass implementation.
- 49% of IT executives confirm the Internet of Things (IoT) plays a key role in their digital business strategies.
It is understood that adoption will only rise in 2021 and beyond, but it is worthwhile to consider ‘what’ a Digital-Business means to the many.
Does digital business exist for meeting customer expectations, or does it enable worker productivity (through mobile apps, AI-assisted automation), or does it assist in managing business performance through data availability and analysis?
There are no wrong answers here because the term – digital business – also includes digitally modifying business processes, developing new revenue streams, and achieving top-line growth through new digital or data-driven products and services.
Following the footsteps of mainstream adoptees mentioned in the survey, are five digital technologies that pilot and prototype in the background. As discoveries come to light, these are arguably covering up new ground and already command our interest. These are Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things, Software-defined networking, and Software-defined storage.
The usage of the term ‘digital’ is indeed ubiquitous.
Changing tracks let us highlight critical areas that digital transformations promise to alter.
In a business irrespective of the organizational function the digital transformation targets – Research, Development, Execution, Integration, or Maintenance – the big underlying question never changes. It is:
Are my digital transformation efforts radically changing my customer experience?
It is neither a simplistic answer nor can it be answered in the binary.
To answer the question with a reasonable degree of balance requires leaders to step into deeper terrains. Furthermore, this deep dive perforce calls for an examination of associated strategy areas. Namely,
- Are the digital transformation journeys domain-led? Said another way, are your digital efforts consciously contextualized to your industry, sector, customer set, and their unique pain points?
- Are your digital investments guided by customer journeys (which are an assimilation of dynamic repositories of your customers’ touchpoints and personas)?
- When it comes to service delivery, customers are increasingly adopting digital channels. Does your domain expertise translate these adoption insights to digitize end to end customer journeys with distinctive omnichannel experiences?
- Does your organization draw advantages from rapid prototyping and agile-first methodology to accelerate the creation of MVP (minimum viable product)? Being able to do this collapses time to market and overall development costs.
All the above-mentioned aspects constitute what can be termed as, ‘Experience Engineering’.
How does one define Experience engineering?
Without going into specific details, experience engineering is a discipline that brings together the art of reimagining digital transformation by architecting and optimizing unique customer journeys.
When such transformations are domain-led, organizations can translate their strategic possibilities into cutting edge practice. This impact happens, more often than not, when customer user experiences are leveraged to unlock the businesses’ true potential.
How does experience engineering become a game-changing practice?
Apart from the competitive edge, as an organization embraces digital transformation it benefits from enhanced employee productivity. The innovative mindset consequently finds its way into more efficient internal processes. One culmination point of this positive momentum is in the creation of ‘data-decision-making’ cultures.
In the longer run, measured through enhanced customer experiences and improved workforce efficiencies, it is experience engineering that is at the heart of a successful digital transformation
