How to achieve customer-centricity in your digital transformation (Part 2)

Customer success is the best outcome for any digital transformation, but how to approach it from a customer-focused lens?

March 2022

This article discusses how to approach a customer-centric digital transformation, and the pivotal role that customer experience journeys and business metrics play in transforming how we function in the digital age:

• What is digital transformation?
• A cohesive approach for customer-centric digital transformation
• The pivotal role of customer experience journeys
• How to develop effective business metrics?

A cohesive approach for customer-centric digital transformation

The following are the key areas that organizations need to consider for their digital transformation journey. Not all organizations will attempt to take on every aspect of the transformation. It will largely depend on their objectives and risk posture. They can be divided into two groups: transformational and enablers.

1. Customer experience transformation (Read here)
2. Operational process automation & transformation (Read here)
3. Digital product development (Read here)
4. Leadership & culture transformation (Read here)
5. Seed funding for critical transformational capabilities (Read here)
6. Organization & business operating model (Read here)
7. Employee experience, skills, talent & digital enablement (Read here)
8. Modern architecture & roadmap (Read here)
9. Core technology platforms (Read here)

Figure: Key areas for an effective digital transformation

Transformational concerns

1. Customer experience (CX) transformation:

The most critical aspect of any digital transformation is the customer-facing experience or every touchpoint where the customer interacts with the brand. This includes all other interaction channels across all lines of businesses including digital channels, sales, call center, back-office, etc. It also includes both retail and business customers and subscribers or members of business customers. Customers interact with the brand either directly through digital channels or representative agents. CX transformation involves both experiences, and additionally, it is also concerned with back-office fulfillment processes. Each of these areas has a potential impact on the customer’s experience.

Numerous methodologies will come together to support transformation, like journey mapping, design thinking, user experience, personalization, Omni experience, dream and design approaches, agile and lean approaches, development of minimal viable products to support fail fast, and test & learn. The transformation needs to enhance the customer experience to onboard, service, and retain customers as well as increase operational agility and time-to-market.

Many organizations initiate their digital and CX transformation in tandem with platform replacements. For instance, I have been part of transformations in telecom companies where they tend to replace large chunks of customer platforms as part of their initial scope. These may include customer relationship management, product catalogs, sales orders, service management, billing/revenue management, OSS and network provisioning, web and mobile platforms, data analytics, and all integrations and APIs. They take an aggressive posture to replace core customer platforms and re-engineer business processes at the same time. It makes total sense to re-engineer business processes in line with newer slicker technology platforms and leverage as much of the out-of-box capability of the platforms to support new business models. Though there is a tendency for the program scope to spiral out of control, I have been fortunate to be part of successful implementations. These programs are intense fast-paced, and at times overwhelming. They require incredibly motivated teams and an absolute commitment to march forward as they negotiate a change in large complex enterprises from a variety of stakeholders and manage time/ money/ scope with vendors. They used to be a trendy transformation pattern in telecom companies, and they created the best outcome to re-engineer legacy processes, products, and technologies.

I have not found similar-paced complex transformations in other industries outside technology companies. Non-tech organizations may not be willing to move at that pace and complexity as it may not be suitable to their culture and risk posture. They may try the test-and-learn and the fail-fast approach before they invest in technology or choose a single area for transformation. This is a complex balancing act that may differ in different industries and organizational cultures.

It is noteworthy that regardless of the transformation approach, customers interact and complete their transactions (with a brand) in a variety of different channels. Until the CX transformation understands its journey completely (i.e., end-to-end), it will leave huge gaps and problems for customers.

2. Operational process automation & transformation:

The re-engineering of existing operational processes to support digital interaction is another critical concern. Digital channels will suffer from a lack of customer adoption without automation in the back office. A straight-through processing system without manual handling is highly desired in digital channels. However, where manual handling is involved, it is essential that customers can track their requests and associated milestones or statuses, and that all sales or service channels see consistent information regarding these customer requests.

Another aspect will be to align the multitudes of outdated processes for siloed business models. Envision a new model from the customer perspective. For instance, if customer moves to a new residence, they interact with the brand to initiate an address change. An outdated process, where every line of business interacts differently due to their primitive product policies, can frustrate the customer, especially for such a simple request. The customer will have to repeatedly call to change their address for different products, where each product may require different handling. This is a nightmare for the customer. For a customer-focused transformation, all fulfillments and service requests must be mapped to end-to-end journeys to understand the CX failures and where process re-engineering is required to deliver a simplified and consistent experience.

In many transformations, product development, customer experience, and process transformation are equally engaged to work in tandem. Not every organization may be able to execute its transformation this way initially, and each department may evolve its vision without buy-in from the others. However, this will continue to be a major CX failure in many areas until they all come together on properly transforming customer experience journeys. There are no alternative approaches to avoid this.

Forrester states, “A digital business harnesses digital assets and ecosystems to continually improve customer outcomes and, simultaneously, increase operational agility. This is a fundamental shift for most organizations. It’s more than just bolting on an app or a new website to your existing operating model. It demands a complete rethink of how you engage with your customers and how your internal processes align to deliver value to them.”

3. Digital product development:

We are in the age of the customer. It is essential to become a digital business. Product or business strategy is now heavily dependent upon digital capabilities, and technology is at the core of this innovation. Technology is playing a pivotal role in developing digital products, and it is changing the game for brands. There is a wide range of emerging technologies in every space. Some are commonly used by all industries and others are specialized technologies within a particular industry segment. These emerging technologies present two challenges:

• While it provides opportunities to find new revenue streams or provides better customer value to increase loyalty and retention, what product strategy can we develop to tap on this?
• How adaptable and agile is an organization to exploit these opportunities faster than other digital disruptors in the market?

Each organization must identify its opportunities. Depending on their digital maturity, they either explore new market opportunities to innovate their new digital products, or they reinvent existing products to be suitable for a new digital business model. They can also partner with other digital providers or value add partners to accelerate their digital business. Covid-19 provided an impetus for many organizations to quickly modify their existing products, distribution, and delivery methods to be suitable for digital channels. Organizations can tap on that momentum to continue to expand their digital footprint.

Reinvent existing products to be digital-friendly to improve digital adoption:

First and foremost, the brand must exist in all digital channels to interact with its customers. This includes new conversational channels like Alexa, Google, or the brand’s virtual robotic assistants. They can also include other IoT (Internet of things) or connected devices that the brand may have directly or indirectly through their partner’s network. Here they generate revenue mostly the same way, but they have much broader audiences and reach through newer digital channels and the potential to tap onto digital personas.

These interactions can be in any of these five areas: educational, marketing, customer service, sales, and orders, or brand loyalty and advocacy in that priority.

• Be present in new digital channels: At the bare minimum, the brand should present its products and services to provide educational material to help customers explore their offerings in all the new digital channels. These interactions often generate leads or help gather customer insights to develop actionable intelligence that may trigger other customer value journeys. This requires organizations to develop a core digital capability to enable progressive customer profiling.
• Improve digital adoption: The brand can significantly improve its digital adoption if it can provide digital-friendly products. For instance, an accurate quotation of their products or services without directing customers to human interaction. In an organization with large technology debt, this may be a monumental task. They lack a good product or offer catalog that can hold complex business rules for product and feature configurations while enabling a simplified experience for the customers to configure their ala-carte offer. Some industry segments that are regulated like insurance or finance have complex sets of reflex questionnaires either to determine eligibility or risk. This often becomes a barrier for products to become digital-customer-friendly. This requires reinvention of existing products and restructuring of customer journeys. How organizations determine eligibility and risk for different cohorts of customers also needs restructuring to allow a more personalized experience where risk is higher. Simply put, if you can’t sell your product or service on digital channels, someone else will. Digital-friendly products enable customers to personalize their products by picking and choosing the features and allowing for immediate delivery upon completion of said orders. This expanded interaction gathers more customer insights to facilitate greater future personalization.
• Increase digital usage: Brands must improve the digital usage of existing products or services because the customer prefers to purchase digitally more often when after-sales service is also available on digital channels (e.g., making payments, check-in to flights, virtual assistants, submitting claims, adding more features to the previously purchased product, etc.).
• Enhance digital footprint through value-add features: Several value-added features can be added to an existing product. These features can change how the customer interacts with the brand or consume their services. Value-added features can include digital advice, virtual assistance, personalized guidance through life moments, community portals, specialized mobile apps, wearables or connected devices, etc.
• Create digital advocacy: Lastly, brands should ensure products or services have good linkages with digital advocacy — that is, a place where customers can share their experiences. For instance, a simple rating of an Uber driver on the app has a deep impact on customer trust for the Uber brand. It became possible only because Uber customers interact with the product digitally throughout its life cycle.

Most large enterprises already have some or many of these digital features at different maturity levels, though they still lack a consistent and connected experience across all channels which reduces product effectiveness in these digital channels.

New digital products:

A more mature organization will look to extend its market by creating a new digital product or service and even go beyond to disrupt the market and aspire to become a leader in that space. Consider what Uber, Lyft, or Airbnb has done for travel; or Netflix has done for video; or Google, Azure, AWS has done for cloud computing. This requires an organization to reach a certain level of maturity in their digital transformation to be adaptable and resilient to change, develop innovation hubs, a sustainable funding model, partner with other market disruptors, and be influential at various industry forums. Here are a few examples of digital products or services:

• Monetize a digital capability and offer it as-a-service. Organizations can develop a niche digital platform that delivers a service to the industry. For instance, street addresses for municipalities, credit bureau scoring, customer insights, payment gateways, community health care, etc. Many platforms provide an open API like Google Maps, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, AppleCare, Telecom MVNE, News media RSS, Spotify, etc. Organizations not only generate revenue from these platforms but can also gather vast insights on consumer usage and behaviors. These open APIs can be offered to both customer segments: B2C or B2B.
• Develop a service provider platform to connect consumers and suppliers. For instance, develop a marketplace platform like Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, etc., or an aggregator platform like Expedia, Priceline, etc.
• Invent a new product with smart connected devices or leverage ecosystems. Products like smart homes, smart cars, and other IoT devices have already penetrated the market. Brands can either invest in developing a smart device or partner with new disruptive players in the market to provide incremental value to their customers.

This is an impactful and lengthy topic that can be elaborated on in a separate discussion.

4. Leadership & culture transformation:

The backbone for change is visionary leadership and execution by motivated personnel. During digital transformation, an organization also needs to foster adaptive culture and reward personnel for progress, and even for failed attempts.

A culture shift needs to be aligned and executed in tandem across people, processes, and technology. A combination of highly skilled labor and poor technology, or state-of-the-art technology and poor process, or even myopic leadership will all fail. I have witnessed companies hiring experts from Google and Amazon only to see them leave in frustration in a few months. Either they couldn’t work with the organization’s culture or they were not allowed to change current processes or policies for innovation purposes.

Although each organization’s purpose for digital transformation varies, generally most organizations are approaching it in similar ways with outcome-based, customer-focused, or data-driven transformations. It requires immense planning to create a blueprint of cultural change, and it should become part of overall change management.

The chart below shows how fundamental the cultural shift could be in the context of digital transformation:

Figure: Traditional vs Digital Enterprise Culture

• · Communication: Executive leadership will have to champion digital transformation and its critical purpose. They should communicate their vision to the board, stakeholders, and middle management to ensure transparency, accountability, and willingness to engage. They all need to buy in and collaborate on the same common mission so that they can innovate faster.
• · Core values: Core values need to be rewritten to reflect the type of culture change envisioned. For instance, to enable innovative culture, product teams should be encouraged to experiment and learn without fearing failure.
• · Job Rotation: An organization should encourage job rotation or even create a policy of maximum tenure in the same role. It benefits in many ways. The same team holding a capability for long periods often stalls progress or innovation. Rotations also increase resilience and business continuity as employees gain more varied knowledge — that is, an understanding of multiple domains. This develops cross-functional skills and better appreciation of other domains, which will foster collaboration and reduce departmental friction.
• · Reskill: It will require immense training, reskilling, and willing employees to create that momentum for change. The employee will require technical training for new technologies and actively participate in innovation projects to harness their new skills.
• Monitor progress: Cultural change needs to be measured and acted upon. Google is highly analytical about its culture. They use “Googlegeist”, an employee internal survey, to measure innovation, autonomy, forward-thinking, teamwork, and all other things they consider to be the DNA of Google Culture in their organization. They take the employee feedback and survey results to action improvements.

5. Seed funding for critical transformational capabilities:

Missed initially in many transformations is the seed funding required for the set of critical core capabilities needed to jump-start the transformation. The core capabilities required to support transformation include customer data, API, analytics, artificial intelligence, DevOps, security, tokenization, and the cloud. Many of these capabilities have lessor visibility on the transformational program and they often stall progress.

I have been part of many programs that take into consideration the incremental cost of enhancing core capabilities as part of the initial business case for digital transformation. However, that may not an easy exercise where business process and technology has been outdated for more than 20 years. In this case, seed funding is required to independently launch an expedited implementation for critical core capabilities.

I consider them transformational for two reasons. Firstly, they provide common functions to enable customer experience and operational transformation. Secondly, organizations generally don’t have “seed funding models” for critical platforms. They rely on business value outcomes to support return on investments (ROI) for the highest achievable results. In this case, the true benefits of the business case can only be realized after the capability is implemented. Hence, a new transformed approach is needed to provide a seed funding model to jump-start implementation with a periodic process to re-evaluate the value it added to the transformation.

Enabling concerns

1. Organization & business operating model

Many large enterprises are good at organizing themselves to ensure stable business operations, business continuity, and risk mitigations. What they are not good at is innovation and dealing with change, which is exactly the purpose of digital transformation. Many are trying to adopt an organizational model like tech giants that runs modular platforms managed by accountable product or platform teams. Each team acts as a service provider to other platforms that consume their service. This provided tech-giants accelerated innovation and time to market.

The words product and platform are interchangeably used as the product team’s outcome is the platform created or its feature enhancements. Though product teams may have many other outcomes (e.g., OKRs related to customer experience measures to improve 10% adoption to x), the physical product they deliver is the new platform or its enhanced features.

Another important aspect is to apply customer-focused and journey-based views to this conversation to organize journey platforms above other cross-cutting platforms. This is to enforce a customer-focused discipline and alignment of incremental feature builds to a customer-value outcome. It also ensures that feature adoption is first tested in the market through journey products before committing long-term investments in cross-cutting products.

Figure: Layered product (or platform) based model

How many of these platforms should an organization have? It depends on the level of granularity required to develop independent modular platforms and the ability to manage their clusters. A central organization unit will be required to coordinate and support activities to spin off a new platform.

Transforming organizational structure this way is a monumental ask for any traditional organization and it touches all functions. It changes the way how strategy is defined, how reporting structure is organized, how culture is idealized, how talent is nurtured, and how technology is acquired.

To make matter complex, the organizational structure is not immediately obvious or understood in the initial phase. This will likely appear as transformation undergoes various phases and reaches increasing maturity levels. The organization will still need to support the existing customer base and operations while it adapts to new ways of working. This huge shift will take time and recursive training.

A strawman business capability model will help guide organizations to the newer structure by clearly understanding their current state and how the NorthStar can be visualized. In more mature digital organizations, these viewpoints are developed very early in the program to ensure alignment and consensus. The strawman model is also included in early scope statements. In others, it may take a lot longer until a consensus is reached regarding departmental accountabilities and structures.

Organization structure will likely evolve to a flatter and more matrix type, tilted towards a platform-based model. Each platform hub will drive its vision, strategy, funding, value streams, and revenue generation. They will act as entrepreneurs do and dream up a product feature and identity how it creates value. However, their success will depend on the organization’s culture — that is, how much power is delegated to platform teams.

Not all platforms will be innovation hubs. Many will be traditional capabilities that an organization generally has. Though, they will also transform to newer ways of working and become more cross-cutting. However, their funding model may not necessarily be entrepreneurial. Most of their funding will continue to come from operational expenditure and is charged back to departments or platforms that consume their services. The capital investment to enhance their (producing platform) features should either be provided by the requesting (consuming) platform owner, or it should come from seed funding. Occasionally, the feature requested is cross-functional, but the first requester is asked to bear the full cost for it. This is a long-standing issue in many organizations and requires a resolution because it’s often a major impediment to innovation.

Ideally in their platforms, they will provide multi-tenancy to accurately accumulate usages and chargeback amounts. Platform teams that consume cross-cutting services are highly concerned about the cost ($) charged to them without explanatory usage details. This charge-back model is a paradox of traditional organizations that needs the resolution to support platform-based models and entrepreneurial mindsets.

Another aspect of funding is that traditional organizations developed their digital capabilities through cost-saving or efficiency drivers, mainly for automation. While this approach will continue to fund some digital capabilities, the organization needs to shift toward a growth driver model to evolve its products to avoid being overtaken by market disruptors in the future.

Platform teams are generally multi-disciplinary like a full matrix organizational model. They are led by a platform owner and include a technical lead, full-stack developers, testers, and other necessary functional staff. They all work as a one-platform team, one-vision, one-objective, and one-outcome or result. They are empowered to make their own decisions based on their entrepreneurial model. These platform teams will persist for a longer duration to iteratively innovate, unlike traditional agile teams.

2. Employee experience, skills, talent & digital enablement:

Unprecedented rapid changes in technology are accelerating organizational shift towards digital channels, data-driven decisions, and automation. Covid-19 crises endorsed the significance of these technologies for business continuity and resilience. It has also provided a new perspective on providing employees flexibility to work from anywhere without direct supervision. Organizations are more focused on outcome-driven work models. This renewed trust in employees is resulting in higher productivity, as expressed by Sunlife President Jacques Goulet in his recent interviews, and Covid-19’s experience points to it.

• The relationship between employee and employer is also evolving. There is a generation gap defined by core values, with the newer generation being more vision and motivationally oriented. This affects how employees want to work, where they work, and what type of work they expect. A critical component of digital transformation is not just winning over customers, but employees too. Today’s executive leadership is taking employee feedback seriously to develop more hybrid and flexible work environments. Increased employee engagement results in improved productivity, which results in happy customers and increased profitability.
• A hybrid work environment means allowing employees to work from anywhere as well as providing agile spaces at the workplace to conduct in-person sessions when needed. This will require a change of policies, security protocols, procurement procedures, and help desk transformation. Work from home means employees can VPN from their home internet and organizations will have to develop new security measures to monitor and eliminate security threats, virus invasions, and data protection. Additionally, IT will need to deliver equipment to employees’ homes and provide virtual tech support.
• Roles and responsibilities will also be impacted by digital transformation as they develop new ways of working. Employees will need to be given a detailed understanding of these new roles and be provided with opportunities to grow.
• Organizations will need a strategy to acquire and nurture talent. Technology plays a central role in digital transformation and finding or retaining skilled talent is more challenging than ever. HR will need to tap on many strategy levers, including hybrid and flexible working models, new career opportunities and progression, and rewarding outcome-based innovative work.

3. Modern architecture & roadmap

Often, digital transformation is linked more to “new ways of working” rather than technological advancements. This is inaccurate, as both are important. Technology is driving the new competition in the marketplace, requiring organizations to adapt to support resulting new digital products. However, technology is ultimately an innovation that requires new business models to fund, sell, and operate it. The digital transformation is enabling organizations to create innovation hubs supported by an appropriate business operating model.

Prior technology innovation relied more on hardware engineering, while this new wave of digital evolution is led by software engineering. This doesn’t mean hardware engineering has stalled, rather hardware is greatly improved in its speed and energy efficiency. Smart devices are a great innovation in reducing hardware size; however, what makes them truly “smart” is their software.

Thus, in most large enterprises, our concerns are primarily focused on software engineering. Briefly, this leads to the following six areas of concern:

Figure: Architectural patterns for software engineering

As indicated above, each of these areas of concern has produced large numbers of software technologies. Digital platforms leverage these technologies and architectures to innovate and modernize (e.g., artificial intelligence). This explosion of new technology has given rise to high demand in the architectural discipline. They help to steer a new way of working, business process re-engineering, data re-organization, security threats, risk mitigation, simplifying complex integrations, and technology selection.

How can architecture support a new way of working?

In traditional organizations, a business will hand over their “digital needs” to IT, who will assign a project team to deliver working software, often in isolation from other business viewpoints. The new way of working now is to create platform teams where business and IT work as one unified team to iteratively develop their platform based on customer value propositions. These teams rely on architectural blueprints to steer their platform innovations.

Enterprise architecture transformation includes the following key areas where a change in architectural practices is required to enable the digital transformation (see figure below).

Figure: Key areas to enable Modern Architecture

Large enterprises generally have established Enterprise Architecture Practice forums, including the Architecture Review Boards to enforce compliance, certifications, and mitigate risk. Over time they became bureaucratic and often conflated by siloed organizational structures and their conflicting objectives. This negatively impacted architecture’s reputation as the facilitator for modernization. Architects need to regain their purpose in digital transformation by making a few fundamental changes to their operating model:

• Renew Governance Process: An adaptive architecture governance process that’s resilient to continuous change and enables agility for time-to-market is required to support platform-based and customer-focused organizations. Architectural practice needs to adapt to new approaches of dream & design, NorthStar setting, conducting MVP, test-and-learn, and fail fast.
• New Operational structure: Personnel should be restructured to align with the new platform-based business model. Architects can be embedded within these platform teams to develop capability blueprints and roadmaps in collaboration with platform teams. In some areas, where these platforms are broken down into smaller capabilities, a principal enterprise architect must be assigned to act as the Chief Architect of the larger platform. This will enable them to develop a consistent NorthStar to guide solutions and ensure compliance with the blueprints.
• Develop vision and guiding principles: During the initial phases of the transformation program, there is a need to develop visionary statements that can guide conversations on how to modernize the architecture. These statements may evolve later, but they are effective initially to guide a variety of complex conversations. Consider the following statements: “we prefer our software products are deployed in Cloud first to support resiliency and speed”, or “Develop software in smaller modules or replaceable components to reduce complexity and increase reuse”, or “We can custom build for differential experience to gain competitive advantage and buy or partner commodity”. Each of these statements provides a rationale and objective, and they are supported by executive leadership.
• Develop a strategy for modern architecture: An overall modernization strategy guideline should also be provided to address complex decisions in terms of when to rationalize or replace or transform a legacy platform.
• Develop a capability model & blueprints to steer transformation: Business capabilities are a combination of business processes, people, technology solutions, and assets aligned by strategic performance objectives. They help in planning a transformation through a business capability lens where each business capability can provide its current state and its future north star.
  
  Capability-based planning is a critical EA Toolkit to understand an organization’s maturity model, business criticality, application and technology health, and gap analysis from current state to north star vision. Other EA Catalogs provide inventories of business processes, applications, interfaces, APIs, data domains, and technologies to understand “what” enables the business capability of an organization, and “who” (personnel) support this business function, and their interdependencies.
  
  These blueprints are generally referred to as Architectural Roadmaps. Each architect must prepare their capability blueprints in collaboration with the business capability owner. These blueprints will help to future-fit technology and guide the technology selection process.
  
  Amongst many EA methodologies, TOGAF provides the best EA framework and is a good fit for a transformation program. It has a built-in capability-based planning methodology and is generally my preferred choice during transformations.

4. Core technology platforms

Core technology platforms are foundational elements and underlying infrastructure upon which another business platform operates. These include compute and cloud, networking, security, databases, filesystems, API gateways, etc. Other platforms that IT manages to support various operational activities including helpdesk, NOC, facility, collaboration, and desktop applications are considered part of core technology.
Ironically, none of these core technology platforms are generally part of digital transformation funding, neither directly nor indirectly. They become very contentious throughout the transformation. Some of them have a significant impact on customer experience or process automation. For instance, security platforms support new security protocols for cloud and partner integrations, customer identity and access management support progressive profiling, API platforms, and event hubs support modern integration, etc.
My suggestion is that these contentious platforms should start their implementation before digital transformation. Alternatively, place them in bucket #5 (for seed funding) as early as possible. These decisions can cost a lot of attrition in digital transformation, and they will significantly reduce the benefits and influence of innovative products and their MVPs.
A few important features that are worth mentioning that should be considered for these core technology platforms are:

• Enable agile practices: The core technology platform and IT should support a new way of working to allow innovation hubs to succeed in their dream and design approach. Traditional ITs have heavily guarded the IT release process (for all the good reasons) to guarantee high availability. The new platform owners will seek more flexibly on-demand releases which will conflict with IT’s risk posture. Some of the IT concerns can be mitigated by leveraging microservice patterns for modular builds, backward compatibility, DevOps, and blue/green deployments. This significantly reduces the risk of iterative fast releases.
• Adaptive & Future-fit technology platforms: While technology is playing a critical role in digital acceleration, it needs to be adaptive and future-fit. For instance, investing in modern API Management and Event Hub platforms can provide that adaptive flexibility to digital transformation. Modern integration patterns will enable leveraging a partner platform to double down on product delivery.
• Portability & Open standards: Ideally technology solutions should be portable, modular, and build with an open standard, e.g., leveraging containerization can allow them to be hosted on any cloud provider, as well as on-prem.
  
  On the other hand, before selecting a turnkey solution from a vendor carefully research their integration and connectivity capabilities. Off-the-shelf software provides a huge value in quick implementations and time-to-market, at the same time their poor capabilities to integrate with an organization’s ecosystem can cost heavily.
• Resiliency: Technology needs to be resilient, as has been seen in Covid-19. These core technology platforms should support business continuity planning, crisis and incident response management, high availability, auto-scaling of computing resources, and leverage global resiliency of cloud infrastructure.

Conclusions

High-tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, etc. are positioned as a model of digitally transformed companies, or where digital transformation is incubated. Their platform-based model supported by their advanced technology, innovation culture, and highly skilled personnel gives them an edge in the digital space.

It is to be noted that they were largely greenfield, and they didn’t have an existing customer base or older technology, so their risk in innovation was much lower. Traditional organizations will have to manage their existing business while they ramp up to innovate and transform. Some industries like the financial sector carry a lot higher risk and they are heavily regulated. This may further slow down their digital transformation. Hence, their transformation will be different from the high-tech companies.

Speed and scope of transformation will vary in every industry and region. For instance, companies in Canada will compare their progress to their region and make incremental progress sufficient to stay ahead of local competition. Large organizations feel secure in their core strengths.

For instance, large telecom companies hold an edge on wireless and land-based networks. It takes a huge investment and time to lay out the network in a country. So, they are not threatened by a new entrant. However, they are still wary that a poor network experience will push subscribers to port over to a competitor. This will compel them to enhance their network traceability to improve end-to-end customer experience. Similarly, large insurance companies may feel confident of their underwriting, something new entrant may not be able to take on. But they can also lose new business if they are unable to respond to changing digital customer behavior and track their customer experience journeys.

Next: The pivotal role of customer experience journeys

The views expressed are my own and do not represent any organization. I aim to have respectful discussions that further positive change as we navigate unprecedented technological transformation. Change is constant, so my perspective may evolve over time through learning, testing, and adapting to new information.