Change is everywhere, it’s accelerating, and most companies today recognize that disruption has come to their industries, fueled by advances in digital technologies and more collaborative outside-in cultures. Indeed, many have already begun a digital transformation to ensure that their business is not left behind.
The technology side of true digital transformation is about bringing information into the fabric of every transaction with a client, partner, employee and process. Digital enterprises leverage information to inform decisions in ways never before possible, to outplan and outexecute rivals.
Transforming to a digital enterprise means understanding the power of contextual interactivity — that is, providing the right information at the right time. With this information at their fingertips, customers and employees are more in control — even in the face of rapid change.
Transforming to a digital enterprise also means focusing on digitizing the back office — the people and processes that unlock operational performance and agility. That is, digital enterprises can reorganize employees for information-driven collaboration, redesign IT processes for zero human touch and focus on continuous systemic improvement.
Digital leaders understand, however, that simply implementing certain technologies isn’t going to be enough to succeed in a world that is becoming more transformed every day. To thrive on the change happening all around us, we have to view “digital” as a comprehensive shift that touches every aspect of the business, from leadership style to products and services. This is the essence of the 21st century organization. (See Figure.)
A digital strategy will drive a different organizational structure – more longitudinal than hierarchical, a different product/service strategies all taking advantage of enhanced relationships with customers and partners, whilst creating natural collaboration across a employees – many of whom will now be sourced from outside the company.
In short, being a digital enterprise means thinking bigger about digital. It’s time to take the next steps on the journey to the digital enterprise.
To guide your path forward, DXC Technology’s Transforming to a Digital Enterprise
position papers series explores five fundamentals of a digital platform. These are the essentials that contribute to both top-line growth and cost-based improvements, as well as continuous optimization of business processes:
- Agile Applications and Digital Experiences – Leverage agile applications and digital experiences. Bring information into the experience to improve context, personalization and value, and use API-driven design to increase speed to market for new and existing apps.
- Enabling the Enterprise Through Hybrid Cloud – Operate the enterprise in the cloud. Clouds provide a more consumerized experience for the business with a pace, quality and standardization that cannot be matched in bespoke IT.
- Empowering Workforces with Invisible IT – Enable secure, productive mobile employees. Deliver better, faster, richer, more collaborative and more personal interactions and transactions, while improving information security in our regulated world.
- Productivity thru Streamlined & Learning Processes – Enterprise processes are the sand in an automated enterprise, changing the way that information is used to guide and reform processes creates an enterprise that is constantly re-inventing processes and generating exponential improvements in productivity.
- Thriving on Enterprise Data and Analytics – Operate an information-driven digital business. Information must become the currency of the organization, with analytics driving correlation and insights to improve everything, and business decisions beginning to support the move from design and perfection to rapid experimentation.
- Managing Enterprise Risk in a Connected World – Manage the increasing complexity of operational risk, which permeates not only security but also availability, serviceability and regulatory execution. Security risks increase as the value of information grows, but other technology risks must become part of the conversation as businesses become more reliant on technology.
Three additional papers examine how specific industries are capitalizing on digital opportunities:
- Defining the Future of Digital Insurance – Deliver entirely new customer experiences, harnessing analytics and automation, via products centered on well-being, safety and the achievement of personal goals.
- Healthcare 3.0 Is Digital – Adopt patient-centric care powered by actionable information, distilled from numerous disparate data sources, that can improve outcomes for individual patients, cohorts and populations.
- Building a Connected Transportation Platform – Deploy a connected transportation platform that unifies data throughout the value chain to create new value for both passengers and cargo during the entire journey.
Across the entire business and technology landscape, streamlining enterprise processes is a must. Many enterprises have not substantially changed their core process architectures since Y2K. Yet today, processes can become more intelligent, thanks to the availability of more information. They can learn and predict, and with the right controls they can be more automated.
A transformed organization recognizes the benefits of automation, robotics and straight-through processing to remove humans (and human error) from the workflow for improved accuracy, speed and reliability. The organization relies on well-considered business logic and policies to determine how data should be used. Further, it makes time for people to not only focus on process and policy improvements to the automatable components, but also dive into the information and generate business value from the weak and strong signals observed.
By having more and better information to guide decisions, transformed organizations will discover their next business opportunity, a change in user behavior they hadn’t considered, the next disruption intent on taking their market share, or the next security vulnerability intent on wreaking havoc – and will have more time to counter these eventualities.
Digital transformation is a journey. As you take steps forward in your journey, the business and technology horizon constantly changes. DXC will continue to bring new insights forward to help clients expedite and succeed in their own journeys.
See the position paper and video, Transforming to a Digital Enterprise: An Overview.
See the entire position paper series and videos, Transforming to a Digital Enterprise.
