Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future: cognizant

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Digital Transformation in Retail - 13 Action Steps

The behaviors and expectations of today’s consumers are rapidly evolving under the influence of digital and mobile technologies; as a result, retail growth and profits are quickly shifting to digital commerce. These changes require retail industry decision makers to acquire real-time situational awareness, new digital strategies and a digital mindset around business transformation. Retailers must recognize and act proactively when customers, competitors and markets change by deploying the appropriate digital strategies and technologies in the right sequence to maximize returns and competitive advantage.

We encourage retail executives to understand and follow these 13 actions:

Recognize the need for digital transformation extends beyond websites and mobile apps to the entire organization and across all business processes.
Understand the degree of change occurring in retail as a result of customers’ fast-changing behaviors.
Judge accurately where your organization stands on a digital technologies maturity curve.
Show the necessary leadership to change strategies, budget priorities and plans based on new data, trends and insights, and then make the required investments in digital technologies, people and skills to compete successfully.
See that traditional channel-centric strategies are no longer viable; rather, retailers must adopt precise, customer-centric strategies, enabled by digital technologies.
Don’t excuse slow adoption of digital technologies, as the data is clear and compelling and demands immediate action.
Think with a digital mindset, intimately understand the capabilities of digital technologies, understand digital’s role and importance in customer interactions, and develop new digital business models, processes and strategies for supporting today’s and tomorrow’s digital markets and consumers.
Realize that digital transformation and the industry’s adoption of digital technologies are occurring on an accelerated schedule that peaks around 2020. It waits for no retailer’s budget cycles, three-year master plan, leadership change or strategy.
Align the pace of digital transformation initiatives with the speed at which consumers are adopting digital technologies, behaviors, markets and thinking. This might mean over-investment in the near term to catch up or stay ahead of the competition.
Unify disparate digital transformation initiatives behind a single company-wide digital transformation doctrine – a guiding statement that effectively describes the reason for digital transformation, what needs to happen and what winning looks like. This doctrine must be used to direct and shape the entire company’s efforts.
Closely monitor the business impact of rapidly emerging digital technologies to ensure investments are prioritized and acted upon in the right time and place to maximize ROI and competitive advantage, while also balancing the need to innovate and embrace a fail-fast, test and learn mentality.
Understand how digital transformation will alter traditional retail roles, responsibilities and skills for all associates.
Pay close attention to how digital transformation shapes and changes consumers’ interactions and experiences, and train associates to best serve digitally enabled consumers.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote, “Change is the only constant in life.” In business, another constant exists: While some companies will adapt to market changes, others won’t. The pace of change across the industry landscape is accelerating like never before. Some retailers will choose to deny, ignore and retrench, while others will embrace, adopt and lead. The race to digital transformation is on, and there is no time for delay.

You can download the full report, "How Digital Thinking Separates Retail Leaders from Laggards" here.

Watch the 3-minute video on digital thinking in retail.

Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mistakes Retailers Make in Digital Transformation

A key challenge that retailers face today is the difficulty of accurately judging where they are on the digital maturity curve relative to their competitors. There appears to be little expertise in making this assessment; for example, 79% of digital leaders don’t know they are ranked as leaders, and only 56% of retailers ranked as average in our study believe they are at this level. The other 44% in the average category mistakenly believe they are either leaders or laggards. The lack of competitive clarity makes it even more difficult to develop an effective competitive strategy.

Our research suggests that retailers’ plans reflect neither self-awareness nor a realistic idea of what it will take to catch up or leapfrog their competitors in this highly competitive space. Namely, factors such as online sales penetration, business performance, attitudes about digital, planned technology investments and efforts to close skill gaps do not align with the progress retailers expect they’ll make vs. their competitors over the next three years.

As part of this research exercise, we also asked 125 retail managers about the biggest mistakes they saw related to the digital transformation. Their top five answers were as follows:

Failing to stay fully on top of changing customers’ needs and behaviors.
Focusing insufficiently on cybersecurity.
Ignoring fresh thinking from outside the company.
Lacking a clear digital strategy.
Moving too slowly.

All five of these top answers are indeed critical to success. Retail executives would be well served to take these opinions from retail managers to heart.

Successful digital transformation initiatives require executives to have a vision for and understanding of what they are trying to achieve. As number 4 above identifies - retail managers believe an unclear digital strategy is among the biggest mistakes companies make when embarking on a digital transformation strategy. Digital strategies flow from and are the result of an effective digital transformation master “doctrine.” The purpose of a digital transformation doctrine is first to create a unified understanding of why digital transformation is needed and, second, to guide all tactical digital strategies that evolve from it. An organization’s digital doctrine should influence its strategy, its operating model and the tactics it employs to compete.

You can download the full report, "How Digital Thinking Separates Retail Leaders from Laggards" here.

Watch the 3-minute video on digital thinking in retail.

Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

Winning Strategies for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

For executives, transforming an enterprise is always difficult, but when an enterprise is highly profitable - digital transformation is even harder. The temptation to follow the maxim, “Don’t fix what isn’t broken,” is just too compelling. "When you average 8% same-store sales [growth] for 35 years, it can breed a sense of, 'Why do we need to change? Things are working,'" John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal. Today, however, Whole Foods is struggling to compete with other lower priced grocery stores that have embraced organics and healthier foods. If you take your eye off the game for a second, consumers will change directions on you.

The challenge enterprises are faced with today is that digital technologies are changing the way consumers behave faster and in different ways than executives have ever seen before. Today’s profits can hide or mask the serious problems of tomorrow.

Competitors can’t compete, and leaders can’t lead if they don’t know the rules of the game. Understanding how the game is played, and how points are scored, are key to any competition. In the age of digital transformation these are some of the key rules to learn in order to score:

Data is the modern commercial playing field, information dominance is your goal, those that can “act and with speed” have the advantage over those which cannot.
Advantages in the speed of data-driven decision-making, automation, robotic process automation will dictate the winners of tomorrow.
Complexity is the enemy of agility, and acts as poison from the past.
It takes an optimized Information Logistics Systems (OILS) to support real-time digital interactions.
Faster operational tempos and information logistics systems – open up a plethora of new business opportunities and business models.
Precision and real-time data beats estimates and conjecture.
Digital interactions require real-time business operational tempos.
Bad data will make the smartest systems dumb.
Competitive advantages from new technologies depreciate quickly – so act fast.
Situational awareness enables management to focus on the knowns, rather than the unknowns.
Demand for real-time digital customer interactions increases the need for contextually relevant and personalized user experiences and digital transformation across all systems and processes.
Data has a shelf life, and the economic value of data diminishes quickly over time, and the more data that is collected analyzed and used, the greater the economic value it produces in aggregate. In addition, the economic value of data multiplies when combined with context and right time delivery.
Digits can be changed faster than the human mindset.

These rules not only help you understand how to compete and win, but they should also guide enterprises in their development of a digital transformation doctrine – a guiding and unifying statement as to the purpose, desired effect and outcome that is wanted.

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Download the full report with charts and data sources here: https://www.cognizant.com/FoW/twa-hyper-digital-transformation-codex2478.pdf

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

Digital Transformation - Mindset Differences

One of the biggest epiphanies that emerged from our research for the report, “How Digital Thinking Separates Retail Leaders from Laggards” is the difference between leaders and laggards. Digital leaders see digital transformation as a positive, while digital laggards express far more fears and concerns related to digital technologies. In fact, almost 72% of digital laggards are concerned they are wasting money by investing in digital technologies, but only 25% of digital leaders share those apprehensions.

In our analysis, the worries expressed by some digital laggards are justified, as they may be the result of existing IT environments that are incapable of delivering a real-time, contextually relevant and personalized digital shopping experience. These concerns may also stem from leadership’s unwillingness to adopt a digital mindset or invest in the required upgrades, technologies, doctrines, strategies, skills and business processes to elevate their organization’s digital wherewithal.

A retailer’s attitude about the potential of digital technologies to positively impact business performance is an important indicator of the company’s commitment to digital transformation and is seen as a predictor of digital success. Digitally mature retailers are significantly more enthusiastic about how digital impacts their work than digital laggards are. Our research findings suggest a correlation between a retailer’s growth trajectory and its confidence that digital technologies deployed between now and 2020 will have a positive impact on growth.

Retail executives at companies that are digital leaders have a far more positive attitude than laggards about the impact of digital technologies on their jobs. These retail executives believe, at a significantly higher level than those at laggard organizations, that digital technologies will help them become more efficient, manage people better, work faster, be more creative and innovative, make better decisions, provide more freedom and flexibility, and make more money.

When asked a more general question about the impact of digital on work, retail digital leaders expressed their belief in a far stronger impact than digital laggards did. The majority of digital leaders feel business analytics, AI, concerns about security and privacy, bots, digital technology regulations and practices will greatly impact work, as will the state of being hyper-connected.

You can download the full report, "How Digital Thinking Separates Retail Leaders from Laggards" here.

Watch the 3-minute video on digital thinking in retail.

Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

Digital Transformation and Time-Space Compression

Speed impacts us in many different and unexpected ways. It can alter how we perceive the world. For example, a person might say they live 5 minutes from town. Five minutes of walking is a third of a mile. Five minutes by automobile is 5 miles - by airline it could be over 40 miles. Our perception of five minutes, and the distance and space that can be covered, changes as technologies advance. Our expectations about what can be accomplished in 5 minutes are transformed. Instead of one hour of shopping in a brick and mortar store, we expect to accomplish the same in one minute online. Dr. Paul Virilio a “philosopher of speed” wrote that increasing speeds destroy space, compress time, and alter the way humans perceive reality.

Time-space compression occurs as a result of technologies that seem to accelerate speed and reduce distances. Digital technologies such as broadband internet, IoT, smartphones, social media, webcams, Skype, mobile messaging apps, satellites, mobile payments, mobile banking, digital commerce, etc. All of these digital technologies and capabilities enable us to experience events, participate in activities and collaborate instantly from anywhere in the world. These capabilities change our expectations and habits, both personally and in our commercial dealings. Organizations that don’t recognize how their customers’ realities and perceptions are changing and why - won’t succeed.

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future

Digital Transformation in Retail - 13 Action Steps

Mistakes Retailers Make in Digital Transformation

Winning Strategies for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Digital Transformation - Mindset Differences

Digital Transformation and Time-Space Compression

Interviews with Kevin Benedict

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