It can be challenging to define what digital transformation means for a business.
Ahmed Yehyia, Head of IT Planning and Delivery at Safaricom, says there are six key areas to consider when starting your journey.
Digital transformation has become one of the latest buzzwords especially in the telecommunication and banking sectors. Yet, it has also proved to be a headache with many firms investing millions of dollars into digital transformation, but years later, having nothing to show.
Such headaches can be attributed to the many challenges associated with the digital transformation journey. For instance, it can be challenging to define what digital transformation means for a business and the key business goals it should achieve.
The good news is that many of these challenges can be tackled by adopting six key considerations in your digital transformation journey. These include having a vision with key performance indicators, choosing the right team, developing the right culture, proper product management, having the right technology and data analytics.
Setting the Vision
For successful digital transformation, your starting point should be a clear and well-defined vision. It is also important to ensure that this vision is properly communicated to all your colleagues, from the CEO down to each employee.
Every employee should also have a clear view of what their role in the digital transformation journey is.
At Safaricom, some of the key motives that we have in our vision include what cost efficiencies are to be achieved, how automation will bring operational efficiency, what new revenue streams stand to be unlocked, how we will improve our customer experience, and, most importantly how digital transformation feeds into our purpose of transforming lives.
We achieve cost efficiency by reducing demand to the call centre by migrating customer interactions to self-service and soon, chat bots. Similarly, automation of our business process has resulted in increased operational efficiency, while resultant new digital solutions such as an Internet of Things platform, an Application Programming Interface (API) and e-Commerce platform are unlocking new revenue streams.
On the customer experience bit, we have added more capabilities to our self-help services while also increasing their ease of use. We are also making more of our services available through mobile applications.
To meet our purpose of transforming lives, we are providing new digital solutions that help our customers unlock more value in their day-to-day lives across different industries, from agriculture to trade.
When it comes to the vision, the trick is to have an overarching theme driving your digitisation process, with your other sub themes feeding into the main theme. Lack of clarity here will likely result in a huge investment and a lengthy project, but with little to show for.
To keep track of your vision, it is advisable to have up to three key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your progress and to establish how far you are from achieving success.
For instance, to track a vision of improving customer experience, indicators can track churn reduction, increase in average revenue per user and increased engagement with company products.
Choosing the Right Team
A clearly defined vision should then be supported by having the right team in place. For starters, it should be clear both to existing employees and prospective employees where your digital transformation journey is headed and what it plans to achieve.
This signals to prospective employees the kind of talent you are looking for and that they will be a perfect fit within your firm. In turn, this means you are hiring people who are passionate about their jobs and who bring in the latest set of technology and skills.
Employee awareness and recruitment should be supported by an incentive for teams to adopt the new technologies and new ways of working. This can be achieved by changing employee KPIs to reward innovation and also to encourage ‘failing fast’ in line with agile and lean methodologies.
It is also important to make your colleagues feel valuable and important in this journey by insourcing for key roles within your digital transformation process, rather than only considering external hires. This sees people transition into roles such as user experience designers, data scientists, digital product managers, passionate software developers and DevOps engineers.
Setting the Culture
The third consideration in digital transformation is how to ensure your processes are supporting your staff and vision. Bureaucratic processes, lengthy project deliverables, and lack of clear milestones will easily prove to be no match to even the best talent.
You should thus demonstrate your confidence in your team by providing them with an environment that encourages freedom, innovation, acceptance and rewarding of failure, high engagement and decision making. Even minor things such as work facilities, branding and seating significantly impact the work environment.
The most effective way to encourage innovation is to shift from hierarchy-based structures to one where product owners are empowered to make their own decisions, without lengthy approvals.
Modernising your Product Lifecycle
Empowerment of product owners should be accompanied by a shift in product management.
Previously, firms have preferred end-to-end development of a product with all features, followed by a big customer launch. The challenge with this approach is if your product does not meet the needs of your customer. This is often discovered way too late, months or even years later after a lot of time, money and resources have gone into the product.
A better approach would be to involve the customer early in product development. The Agile Methodology allows for exactly such an approach.
After a product vision has been established, it is then broken down into high level features with Minimum Viable Product (MVP) defined. Development then involves prototyping and deploying an MVP, followed by collection of customer feedback and incorporating this into the next iteration until the entire product is complete.
At Safaricom, we deployed this approach with some of our digital products – Masoko and Safaricom App. The app, for example, first launched with key data and voice services, followed by an update that included key M-PESA features, with the third iteration bringing additional M-PESA features and M-PESA financial services.
What we see is that a product that would have taken more than 18 months to get to the market is available to customers in less time. This means that if your product was to fail, it will also fail early saving you resources that would have further gone into the project.
Why you should Automate your Delivery Cycle
Having the right technology is critical in helping companies achieve high agility in their product delivery. It is almost impossible to achieve high quality and a competitive time to market with manual testing and deployment.
A fully automated development cycle following continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment approach (CI/CD), a micro-service architecture and a well-defined cloud strategy facilitate growth of successful products while also making it possible to do away with failed products almost instantly.
Data Driven Insight over Human Instinct
The last ingredient to consider for successful digital transformation is data analytics. We have previously relied on leadership capabilities and experience for decision making. We are, however, at an age where the world is transiting from purely relying on human insight to data driven insight.
The shift to data-led insight then not only requires organisations to deploy machine learning and deep learning, but to also shift to a culture where they can trust insights derived from data just as we trust our instincts.
This transition can easily be achieved by focusing KPIs around decision making. It is also important to emphasise that data is now becoming a firm’s most important assets ahead of physical assets or even technology itself.
With these six ingredients in place, any organisation should be in pole position to make a success of their digital transformation journey. The capacity to build your own minimum viable product driven by the six aspects here makes you likely to succeed and be fit for the future.
