To harness the three-point approach and accelerate purposefully towards digital transformation, companies need to establish a cloud-enabled, Artificial Intelligence-powered, digital-first mindset, across all aspects of their business. That means putting digital at the heart of operations and building digital capabilities across the value chain. In addition, companies must pay careful attention to transformation management to establish a working culture in which digital initiatives can thrive.
A successful digital transformation will rest on defining clear objectives at the outset – companies must set a destination with a comprehensive digital vision. This needs to be broad enough to encompass their own organization and the wider ecosystem, as well as articulate what the vision means for all their stakeholders. The digital value proposition must also be defined upfront, with a clear idea of the performance drivers and strategic objectives that will inspire innovation and create value. With that vision set, companies must develop a digital roadmap, with clearly defined milestones.
To support their journey to digital transformation (figure 2), companies must build digital platforms to break down silos, maximize data and solution synergies, and reduce the cost of digitization by avoiding the need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ for each digital program. Deploying digital twins and digital threads can ensure smooth product lifecycle management across different functions and organizations.
At the same time, it is important to take a pragmatic approach to legacy technologies, with a multispeed IT approach that builds digital capabilities progressively. It’s also important to foster a digital culture to embed and sustain new ways of working across the organization.