Dave Ives, Chief Customer Officer at Altron Karabina, gives his tips to companies who are looking to adopt Digital Transformation.
Does your business have a clear Target Operating Model and defined way of working in this new world?
If not, try and build a simple model of the business and how you intend to operate in this digitally enabled era. There are plenty of tools like Business Model Canvas and a few others to help you simplify the business operating model.
Do you have a clear set of key business processes that need to be configured or changed to enable the business?
Why bother building Standard Operating Procedures and process maps on outdated processes when the key processes need to be defined first. You may start going down the rabbit hole only to realise that process needs to change in the first place. We have developed a very simple Business Control Model together with key processes to help define this and link it to the operating model in the business. We have also defined in conjunction with these processes, the right level of analytics and reporting required to highlight efficiencies in the process. Whether this is in the financial reporting, sales or down to warehouse management systems to show errors and issues at a site level.
Application landscape and inventory defined? What if you go out and buy applications without having defined the first two steps?
Well, you might have some cool apps, but Frankenstein might well be alive and well in the application landscape and architecture of your IT systems. Defining the application landscape aligned to on premise vs cloud and how these would service the key processes in the post-modern application world is important. Mapping these to how they fulfill the revamped and legacy processes with easy standards and way of working will change the way a business works. While we have focused on the Microsoft solution stack with Dynamics 365, Office 365 and Azure as the cloud platform, our tools are generic for most scenarios and platforms. Don’t do this at your peril – just when you think your system is standalone and does not need integration is when you need to start hiring lots of people to add data and information to make it easier to interface to.
Consider your IT platforms including networking and connectivity
Once you have made some clear strategic decisions on what you want to enable and applications to support this going forward, the platform to deliver this becomes an important discussion. From new technologies like Software Driven Networks (SD-WAN) to new methods of cloud enabled infrastructure, these technologies can reduce barriers to entry and improve the customer and employee experience dramatically. When we have considered a combination of new Azure capabilities with the latest networking technology from a number of providers, we have seen how applications and processes have changed the way companies interact with their customers. This is sometimes done the other way around where companies have a large revamp on platforms planned but are seriously misaligned to the company strategy.
