From ‘Doing Digital’ to ‘Being Digital’

From ‘Doing Digital’ to ‘Being Digital’

By John Burgin, APAC Head, Digital Business, Cognizant

All
business leaders have heard the call — and with good reason — to become
‘digital’. We’ve seen many established companies across the globe get
disrupted by the likes of Lyft,
Pandora, Airbnb and Purplebricks, names that showed up seemingly out of
nowhere and forced companies across and beyond their sectors to sit up,
take notice and reengineer themselves.

Most
business leaders recognize that they need to employ a digital strategy
to avoid becoming the next hapless victim of disruption. We all know
what ‘doing digital’ looks like.
The majority of us have actively embraced social media platforms and
also taken opportunities to simplify our lives through online banking
and bill payment services. As a society, we’ve embraced digital tools to
replace traditional ways of working. The crux
of digital transformation, however, lies in learning to go from ‘doing
digital’ to ‘being digital.’

For
enterprises, truly embracing digital means altogether re-imagining the
traditional operating model. Consider an airline that wants to take a
fundamentally different view
of the experience it provides to its customers. One day, a business
traveler asks a flight attendant for her favorite cup of coffee. The
airline captures this preference — and many others — to build a detailed
persona for the traveler. Aside from standard
travel preferences — class of travel, seat type, dietary requirements —
the airline builds a richer view of specific information that can help
provide a delightful new experience for the frequent traveler. 

Imagine
the beautiful surprise when on the next trip, the traveler is collected
by a limo driver who hands over a long macchiato whilst discussing the
itinerary for her trip.
The traveler is further delighted to find that check-in and transfer of
luggage to her preferred hotel accommodation at her destination have
been arranged, and that leisure activities, including gourmet dining and
a golf tee time, have been pre-booked. The
airline has thus delivered a truly exceptional travel and hospitality
experience, one that requires a fundamental change in the airline’s
business plan, enterprise architecture and operational processes.

At
companies that have made the leap from ‘doing digital’ to ‘being
digital’, contextually-relevant, hyper-personalized experiences,
agility, mobility and social linkages tend
to continue across all stages of the customer journey. On their part,
customers can easily differentiate between companies that embrace
digital as part of their DNA and those that have thrown together a mixed
bag of digital experiences in a bid to go digital.

Who should be in the driver’s seat?

Digital
endeavors require a centralized effort, but cannot be the
responsibility of a single team. However, adopting a digital mindset can
only happen with active sponsorship
from senior-level executives, including the CEO.

Companies
looking to grow as digital businesses often start with smaller digital
initiatives in various parts of the organization. These initiatives are
not run-of-the-mill projects.
Instead, they require new thinking around implementation and ROI
analysis, outside the usual framework of annual budget cycles, making it
vital for the CEO to be fully on board.

Digital
transformation efforts that are led exclusively by the CMO or CIO often
fall short of addressing transformational needs across the business, as
they fail to prevent insular,
departmental or divisional agendas from overtaking the enterprise
digital mandate. The most holistic transformations can take place by
creating a focused organizational unit to drive the digital agenda in
collaboration with all functions across the organization.

Use a human lens for digital success

For
companies looking to drive meaningful change, it’s important to make
sure that any initiative is aligned with changing industry dynamics and
the shifting needs of their customers.
In this case, ethnographic research can provide useful insights into
the type of new experiences that different types of customers will
respond to. Such insights can make the difference between success and
failure of a new product launch. They can also be
used to start the important work in re-thinking the company operating
model and enterprise architecture.

Don’t change. Evolve

Growing
into digital maturity — from ‘doing’ to ‘being’ — is a process of
evolution, encompassing experiments and failures. The transformation
might start at the periphery of
the organization, but ultimately redefines the enterprise. Companies
intent on success must foster behavior that encourages difficult
questions, challenges industry norms, and looks beyond organizational
boundaries.

Companies
must continue to build or leverage external capabilities in
ethnographics, data sciences, automation and artificial intelligence to
become digital. The reward for doing
so is to put the company on a new path to sustained customer loyalty
and trust and thus, higher revenues, better reputation and higher
employee satisfaction.