Based on my experience as head of Digital Transformation at Grupo Oesía, where innovation and digitization itself are part of our DNA, I share some reflections on how we help our clients to equip themselves with the necessary digital capabilities to evolve their business.
The motivation
The first thing we should ask ourselves is why my company should take this path. What do I hope to achieve?
I observe that the companies that have already embarked on the path of transformation have told us that their main motivations for undertaking or deepening greater digitalization have been:
- Extend innovation in the company
- Create new business models
- Achieve greater business agility
- Obtain greater productivity in the workplace
In summary, we are talking about: Innovation in all the company’s processes, expansion of the P/S portfolio, more satisfied employees and, therefore, more productive. With an impact on all parts of the organization: business, processes, customers, suppliers and employees, with the aim of obtaining greater value.
Cultural change
The digital transformation supposes a cultural change in the company that affects all its components. They need to change their mindset to acquire a digital mindset with new skills:
- Outside-IN thinking. Where ideas come from the outside in, with a focus on the client.
- Focus on continuous learning. Learn -> Ideate -> Build -> Produce -> Measure -> Collect Data -> Learn. Without fear of failure. There is no problem with having errors, the problem is that we are not agile enough to detect the error, remove it and move on to the next activity.
- Agile execution. Continuous delivery through incremental interactions, with the use of agile methodologies.
- Collaboration across company silos. Multifunctional and autonomous teams necessary to break down both external and internal barriers.
- Partnership. Lean on third parties to take advantage of their value offers and add them as an extension of your portfolio.
- Management through data. Data centrism. Improve both decisions and actions themselves, through the intelligent use of data.
The transformation must allow the company’s business models to evolve in order to be competitive not only today but also in the future. Facing the cultural change that this transformation entails by equipping itself with the necessary capacities to be able to achieve said transformation.
And what role does technology play?
The first thing we have to understand is JobTobeDone and CustomerJourney so that, through the use of technology, we can respond to the different needs of both the business and the customer.
Once with the clear use case and the solution to cover the needs of the service, we have different enabling technologies for this transformation:
- The RPA or automation of processes through robots. Capable of influencing the automation of business processes through the mechanization of manual and repetitive steps, which produces increases in efficiency, reduction of process errors, improvement in the e2e times of the process, etc. Projections in the global technology market reveal that hyperautomation will reach $596.6 billion by 2022, according to Gartner’s forecast.
- Business Intelligence, Big Data and A.I. For this we need to make use of all the information, of all the data, of the client bases and potential clients, to be able to identify said needs. Therefore, we have to be super agile when dealing with these volumes of data, both in time and in form.
- We have to achieve and acquire both prescriptive and predictive knowledge that allows us to be able to anticipate and be able to propose solutions and services to our clients, even before they are able to know that they need that product.
- Conversational Artificial Intelligence and image recognition of videos or characters. AI applications that allow us to improve the relationship with our customers and expand the channels of interaction, providing efficiency in interactions, 7×24 availability, scalability and improvement in the customer experience.
- Cloud Computing. It will allow you to choose the level of service and interaction you want with the PSC: IaaS, PaaS or SaaS.
- The internet of things. Infinite possibilities thanks to sensors, cameras, devices that we wear and devices of all kinds, which thanks to the latest generation mobile networks improve people’s daily lives. Applications from home to Smart Cities. The IoT will reach its full potential hand in hand with 5G. With 5G, there are endless opportunities to reach a hyperconnected world, which will make it possible to develop hitherto unthinkable solutions.
- Virtual reality and augmented reality. The latest addition to this ecosystem, but no less important.
All this technology will allow companies from different sectors to adapt and turn towards a digital transformation, not only to be competitive today but to position themselves for the future, offering a differential value proposition.
Conclusions
Any innovation that entails a Digital Transformation requires a Strategy that involves a thorough review of business models, processes, people and infrastructure, with a focus on the customer, operational improvement and data.
Finally, we must not forget that the new digital technologies are mere facilitators of this Transformation, which is why it must be clear that technologies must be a means and never an end in itself.
Antonio Hernández, head of Digital Transformation at Grupo Oesía