The 7 Imperatives for Thriving During Digital Transformation

Center for Digital Intelligence
These days it's not hard to identify the challenges organizations are facing during today's rapid business and digital transformation.  What's more difficult is knowing how to succeed.  The following recommendations are the result of our analysis after interviewing 37 executives and over 80 high tech professionals involved in digital technologies.
  1. Develop and monitor your own digital mindset and that of your organization's: Understand the need to continuously upgrade and update your own thinking, as well as your organization’s.  Accept that digital technologies and a connected world are here to stay, and that the path to business success resides in them. Understand digital technologies and their capabilities, and rethink every aspect of your business, and business strategy, with a digital mindset.
  2. Recognize the role culture plays in being successful in three key areas: your leadership, institutional and customer culture.  Purposely develop a digital culture that accepts and embraces the rapid pace of change that comes with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
  3. Understand the four areas of digital transformation where speed is essential: technology, organizational agility, leadership decision-making, customer alignment.  Recognize the consequences of being slow in any of these areas and focus on improving them.
  4. Organize for speed and agility: Digital businesses operate in real-time, and digits can travel at the speed of light.  Bots and automation augment humans to deliver business in digital or future time.  The strategic imperative is to enable the business to support these speeds and keep pace with fast-changing digital consumer behaviors.
  5. Know the unknowns: If your organization is operating on conjecture as a result of data blind spots, fix that with sensors, analytics, artificial intelligence, automation and machine learning.  Help your businesses operate at a level of precision never before possible. 
  6. Harvest the future: Embrace predictive analytics to capture tomorrow’s competitive advantages today, and invest in teams of innovation analysts that can identify new and emerging technologies, understand the possible business use cases, and document predicted ROIs faster than competitors.  The value of innovations and inventions depreciates rapidly over time, so catching them early optimizes value.
  7. Lead the leaders: Continuously educate and train your leadership and board to ensure they keep their mindset, experience and strategies updated and evolving at the same pace as innovations are being introduced and markets are evolving.  Running the day-to-day operations of a large enterprise is complex and all consuming, and without a formal process, plan and schedule for continuing leadership education it doesn’t happen.
Thriving during digital and market transformation does not happen by accident.  It is a purposeful effort to recognize changes, embrace, innovate and win as a result of changes.

Read more in my series on competitive advantages in digital transformation:
As an independent analyst, consultant, speaker and futurist, I am available for new projects and interesting opportunities.

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Kevin Benedict
President, Principal Analyst, Futurist, the Center for Digital Intelligence™
Website C4DIGI.com
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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
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