Historical Successes and Lessons from Digital Transformation

As a former CIO, I was closely involved in a succession of new technologies that triggered major long-term advances in our business and personal lives: from mainframe computers to the advent of PCs, then the worldwide and e-mail, internet & e-commerce, mobiles, sat-nav, social media and cloud.

Did those technologies transform the companies involved? In many cases, yes. But only when the organisation, including senior leadership, took time to grasp the new technology's real business potential and made sure it aligned with and supported its strategic goals.

However important those and other advances were at the time, they were spaced over a period of about forty years. So, businesses had time to think about each, make an informed decision and then implement in stages.

How does Digital Transformation work now?

In today’s digital age, a wide range of advantageous technologies are coming to market simultaneously. And the majority of those are getting better and cheaper every few months. They include ground-breaking supply chains of software, networks, and hardware, including robotics, smart machines, and Artificial Intelligence.

They are also becoming easier to configure and use. Each might have a different purpose, but modern connectivity and global networks can help your firm to quickly establish new business models and collaborative networks, or ‘ecosystems’, with suppliers & partners.

Separately, each technology might well benefit your business, such as using low-cost warehouse robots to reduce logistics costs or machine learning AI and Chatbots to handle routine queries. But grouped together and correctly linked to your business strategy, they also have the potential to transform you into a world-beater.

Technology alone won't make a Digital Transformation succeed

Many businesses start their digital transformation journey by selecting one or two potentially exciting digital innovation and then become discouraged when the breakthroughs they originally expected don’t take place.

Likewise, converting inefficient and ineffective business processes into digital ones won’t make them any better. Effective digital transformation means re-examining your company’s business operations end-to-end, and even modifying its culture and updating its legacy systems. At a minimum, it involves changing the ways that staff work and how interactions with customers take place. The role of partners and suppliers also needs to be examined, as well as how internal decision making takes place. And of course, not forgetting the measures that your firm takes to secure its data and financial information.

So ‘digital transformation’ is a misnomer. For your technology investments to reap the right rewards your business must transform along with technology.

Why is this important to you and your business?

The UK’s ability to support digital transformation on a national scale has slid below that of many other countries. According to case studies in 2018 (from OECD, IMD & IFR), Britain is now 35th in the European continent for fibre broadband. Our mobile broadband access is 20th out of 63 countries. Of the 10 car making nations in the EU, Britain ranks last in the take up of robotics. And for a country that invented much of the computing technology in use today, we have a lower % of IT professionals in our population than Estonia, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland.

Our own 2018 study of hundreds of UK and USA businesses showed that over 40% of UK businesses are not planning to develop a digital transformation strategy for 2019, or for at least the next 2 years. Of the ones that do have such a strategy, most are focused on customer-neutral technologies such as financial reporting and administration. By contrast, USA companies are investing heavily in digital technologies that improve customer experience, help to predict future demand with ‘Big Data’, and recruit scarce talent into their organisation.

Former CIO, Ross Harling, has helped numerous organisations with technology-driven business transformations. He has received several Business, Ethical and Environmental awards for his work in this and other fields. Since 2014 Ross has also been an Expert Evaluator for the European Commission on Business and Technology Innovations.