4.4 How to Get “Digital Transformation” in a Right Way for Any Business
A lot of executives have the idea about the threat from initial start-up competitors who are adapting digitalization, but how the existing companies can move fast, without any violation?
Approximately three-quarters of business leaders is alert about their organization which is prone to disruption, but a lot of leaders are not showing their interest to take the initiative of taking risk to transform. As per the analysis done on 500 executives belonging from UK and Ireland, fifty percent (50%) of the enterprises take the start-ups as a serious threat and approximately one-tenth of the enterprises do not gets agreed that they have any market competitor. Originally, seven percent (7%) of the executives said that the enterprises are not worried about the threat of digital disturbance. One of the experts, Kevin Hanley, who is the head of innovation at Royal Bank of Scotland, shares his three best practices for converting digital distraction into an advantage for the current competitive environment.
4.4.1 Look Beyond the Traditional Enterprise Firewall
Kevin Hanley is responsible for various types of activities at RBS, such as exploring innovative ideas worldwide, managing exploratory labs and applying the control process which supports to take creative ideas from theoretical to practical. He talked to some smart people globally and met around 1,500 companies in a year dealing with technologies ranging from larger organizations to smaller starts-up. He believes about the world, especially in finance, is getting changed exceptionally. The technology is getting changed so fast and it is becoming cheaper and ubiquitous which is representing a significant shift of the organization dealing with finance. The business operations related to traditional banking system has been broken into smaller one and most of them are being provided by the industries. Companies dealing with finance which are successful must identify and hold such change. To achieve success in the current scenario of disruption, large banks should merge their long-lasting skills with the knowledge of new entrants. Business executives are emphasizing to innovate, hence, should look ahead of the legacy enterprise firewall. Yet, Hanley warned the leaders and other executives about the change in cultural element are more complicated as compared to the technical transformation. Finance is turning to be more competitive and businesses should be more open. The success of the executive will be determined by the ability to work with others. There are various opportunities available for each type of organizations whether it is big or small but with the right skills. The organization must be able to adopt the changes technically and culturally [14].
4.4.2 Bring New Ideas From the Edge to the Core
As per the Kevin Hanley, those companies which are looking for transformation should make progress in two directions in parallel: (1) present and (2) the future. In first direction, organizations should emphasize on their existing traditional set-up, they must simplify the systems and build the technology efficient. Fix the complexity which you already have so that core can be improved. In the Second direction, executives must consider about their required aims and work backward from that state. Hanley advised that challenge yourself to think about the world just after ten years in advance and the activities you should do today to hold the opportunities which are getting emerged. He warned the executives not to make choices between these two directions i.e. present and future. Executives can simply emphasize on one or other but they must deal with both. If they emphasize on present, risk may increase; if they emphasize on innovation and creativity, basic operational concerns may fall down. RBS has established separate policies and control processes for the innovation which lets Hanley and his team members to experiment separately [14].
4.4.3 Define the Role of the CIO in the Innovation Process
We must have the answer of this question: who must lead the process of innovation? While 49% of senior executives thinks that CIOs (Chief Information Officer) must be accountable for driving innovation in technology, as per the Dell EMC research, more than half (54%) of the executives feels that their IT leaders should make so many controls which restrict the potential for creativity. RBS considers innovation as an activity which covers all business units. Hanley considers that other businesses must adopt a similar stand and stay away from placing power for digital distraction in the hands of the IT department. As per Hanley—if innovation and creativity is especially the responsibility of the CIO, technology just becomes a hammer looking for a nail. If you are trying and changing your organization within normal business cycles, creativity of executive will be squashed. At RBS, Hanley is running short, sprint activity and there is a separate fund for it. They are presently exploring 40 innovation initiatives. Hanley runs monthly forums with chief executives at partner start-up organizations. These forums include the members of the RBS executive board [14].
4.5 Relevance of IoT in Digital Transformation
As a recent technology Internet of Things (IoT) is getting popularity and companies are trying to adapt it for their businesses. Hence, companies are required to have a plan to implement IoT in their business and to protect their data also. In the next coming five years, there is a prediction about the number of IoT devices and will reach around 50 billion. It means that you are putting the sensors on everything. It may be any devices, things, tractors or it may be anything you can think of.
Dignan think IoT is the very essential components which include digital transformation. It will transform the entire business by making changes in the way how you track your inventory and the supply chain, providing you more analytical data, and more insights. The best place where IoT will be most transformative can be seen under the smart city environment such as sensor based monitoring and controlling of traffic or supply of water or leakage. However, there is one challenge along with the collection of data generated by the sensors that deciding which data is important and should be kept for futures purpose, and which doesn’t. Since storage is cheap, companies can keep data lying around. As per the Dignan, companies are putting a lot of sensors in most of the devices, and not aware or not having plans what to do with that data. Data which is collected and left lying around for potential use later can become vulnerable to attacks. As the data moves to the cloud, it needs to be secured. Dignan said that IoT is going to make everything smart, which is a little freaky yet also kind of cool.
4.6 Conclusion
Authors conclude that the recent trend of business transformation requires huge transformation in technologies as world is moving towards the concept of automation, implementing smartness in smart environment where the people are living and making efforts for the development. This paper covers the importance of business transformation, digital transformation and, technologies required for business transformation. Implementing digital transformation into a business doesn’t mean that to apply technology which does the process digital, but it is more than that which includes the way that the employee works with such tools and works with teams. Hence digitalization is a method used to help in the business transformation. Digital transformation supports business transformation, but it doesn’t mean that business transformation is dependent on digital transformation and vice-versa. Both the process must be implemented with the proper policies to achieve the success in the market. Apart from the various benefits of using recent technologies, some challenges related to maintaining the quality process of business, issues related to security of customers data and increasing the customer satisfaction and number of customers etc. are also there which we must handle in different domains.
References
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