Make People the Focus of Your Digital Transformation
By Chris Spears, Chief Technology Marketing Officer, ARKE
People are the heart of every digital transformation. But too often, organizations make technology the priority — obscuring the real purpose and potential value of their investments.
To make the most of technology, organizations should channel the young knight Perceval.
Perceval achieves his final quest in one of the most enduring versions of the Arthurian legend by asking a simple question: “Whom does it serve?”
That’s the key question organizations should ask before they invest in any technology.
As Forrester maintains, digital transformation requires broad and systemic enterprise-wide change. More specifically:
“True digital transformation requires a sharp break with past practices, legacy systems and even long-standing partners.” It is “driven by the aggressive adoption of digital technologies but supported by equally important changes in culture, leadership, skills, and processes.”
Taming Technology
How does technology improve the lives of your employees, your customers, your partners, your suppliers, and other stakeholders?
To answer that effectively, start with strategy. A strategic approach enables companies to more effectively leverage their technology investments and create more compelling and frictionless brand experiences.
At ARKE, we call this Marketing Technology Alignment or MTA. It’s a framework for measuring experiences, people, process, technology, and data maturity. The goal is to help businesses navigate to better brand experiences.
Architecting Experiences
By using their understanding of people, processes, technology, and data to win and retain relationships, organizations can help their companies grow. Here’s a suggested four-point plan.
- Engage all of your employees, your first customers. Reach across the organization. Bring in Marketing, Sales, Support, IT, and representatives of your other constituencies. Don’t try to transform in a vacuum. Many of your employees are already thinking the way you are.
- Leverage a tool like ARKE’s Journey Mapping Framework to design at least one persona journey. Think small, and articulate the shortcomings of your journey.
- Build a technology map to accurately assess tools you own and how you use them. Look for value in the systems you have already purchased through enhanced integration opportunities.
- Use the most valuable data (MVD) — the data that matters most to your customer and to your business. Think like your customer.
This plan leads to thoughtful technology integrations that produce clear data insights and address customer issues proactively.
By knowing the data, initiating process improvement, and integrating systems, companies will create actionable alignment across people, process, technology, and data.
Need help mapping technology to your buyer’s journey? Contact Chris.Spears@arke.com for more information, including a copy of ARKE’s Journey Mapping Workbook.
