I recently came across this interesting infographic by infomentum summarizing the key elements of driving digital transformation in an organization. You can view a video as well at the source post – TALKING TRANSFORMATION: THE CEOS GUIDE TO DEALING WITH DIGITAL DISRUPTION
Besides the info-graphic though, some of the common steps that you would find organizations lean towards are:
- Establish a Digital Center of Excellence to Drive Digital Capabilities – A good model to bootstrap your digital journey as long as this is the beginning and not the end. I talk about this in one of my previous posts on DCOE and sharing my thoughts on why it is a great start but cannot be the ultimate vision because digital has to be a mindset across the organization and cannot be isolated to one group for very long. The easiest way for me to summarize the digital capability landscape is by putting these under four key categories:
- Media
- Content
- Data
- Commerce
The COE is responsible for establishing the vision, the strategy, best practices, standards, infrastructure and everything else that pretty much defines the “capability”.
- Establish and Invest in a Marketing Technology Office – With the growing influence of technology on marketing and consumer experiences, investing in a conscious marketing technology office or capability can no longer be an option. Technology is now the interface of marketing, it is the lynchpin that is stitching the rather fragmented and broken consumer experience together and a marketing technology office is responsible for identifying, testing and adopting enterprise, emerging and innovative marketing technology capabilities within an organization; delivering immersive seamless consumer experiences and driving both top line and bottom line growth for brands.
- Establish a Digital Agency & Partnership Footprint – A key component of your digital ecosystem, identifying the right partners who themselves are challenging to converge across the traditional boundaries of creative agencies, digital agencies, media agencies and technology system integrators.
- Drive Innovation through a Digital Innovation Lab – In a world that is being disrupted and redefined each day with all the innovation in the world marketing and technology, raising the bar for consumer expectations and desires; it is imperative for brands to focus on the “NOW” and “NEXT”. They can no longer wait for the future to arrive, the future is already here and brands need to pro-active think 12-24 months ahead and continuously challenge and push their own boundaries. It is adopting the start up mindset that continues to pivot and focuses on constant testing and learning.
- Build Digital Talent or Unicorns & Raise Digital IQ of your Organization – None of this is possible without the right talent which is still a scarcity because of the fast pace at which digital is evolving and the slowness in the evolution within academics and universities that are producing future talent. Marketing is in need of these unicorns who sit at the intersection of traditionally isolated verticals of marketing, sales, technology, data and even finance. The investment in raising this talent should be focused both from an inside out as well as outside in standpoint.
Each one of these steps rightly deserves a dedicated post on it’s own but I hope this provides a broad overview of conceptualizing your digital transformation at least at a 50000 feet level. Enjoy this infographic from INFOMENTUM
