One constant since the beginning of time is change. However, the fear of change is also a deterrent when it comes to progressive business transformation. If anything, the pace of change keeps on increasing, modifying and altering its form while organizations are finding several challenges and opportunities to respond to their environment and their customer’s changing lives.
Digital Transformation is not a technology trend, it’s a transitional process
Due to the pandemic and also recent technological advances, most companies are transforming their business to align with the requirements of digital business, a leap which would have otherwise taken several years. Corporate leaders today recognize that digital transformation or technology innovation must be coupled with operational excellence. At the onset of the pandemic, operational excellence became inevitable for business continuity.
Today, operational excellence in financial and technology services also focus on continuously improving the digital experience for customers while collating consistent feedback for the organisation. According to a survey, 92% of executives believe that further investments in Big Data and AI are required to transform their business into an agile and competitive one.
DevOps practices and cloud platforms can slingshot enterprise technology forward, improving client awareness, time to market, and resilience, but they depend on continuous improvement to become internalized and self-sustaining.
Using Continuous Improvement to Scale Digitization
Reputable organizations can’t immediately uncouple their overly complex and often fragile legacy systems, data, and processes from their new development efforts. Without dedicated continuous improvement, they’re still investing resources in fixing the old, reactively fire fighting after breakdown, delivery defect, security breach, or other failure. This drains the resources and wears away clients and business confidence, the very thing most needed for the organization to justify additional investment in digital transformation.
While technology spends should go up, however, most technology leaders lament the continuous pressure to cut costs. Lean aligns perfectly with a focus on client experience. By focusing on eliminating waste, continuous improvement frees intellectual and capital resources and reduces cost. You can then reinvest these benefits to improve and innovate how you inform, learn from, and engage with clients and to reimagine the organization’s value in new ways.
With alignment to the business strategy and analysis of continuous improvement Digital Transformation Evaluation is performed in two stages
1. Continuous Improvement Stage for Business Optimization: Given the aggressive and changing environment faced by organizations, it is important to consider continuous improvement methodology that allows an augmented, sustainable, and cost-effective digital business model. Methodologies those stand out among themselves in the search for continuous improvement of the operations of an organization are:
· Six Sigma, which focuses on providing a way forward to continuously improve the quality of the product or service.
· Lean Methodology, which provides a way forward to continuously improve efficiency in service delivery or manufacturing.
· Digital Continuous improvement tools that offer powerful business benefits. These tend to leverage the best aspects of other improvement tools and combine them into one easy-to-use solution.
2. Learning and advanced analysis: Digital organizations must always seek operational excellence, competitive innovation. In order to analyze what innovation is required, the organization has to study the current performance of the 5 main pillars (Business, Organization, Objects, Data and Processes) with precise and relevant metrics. In the execution of the key processes that support the new business models of the Digital Company, it requires to process all the information in real time (through BAM — Business Activity Monitoring), so that it has the capacity to generate alerts or make decisions (reaction to business events or changes to be applied for continuous improvement) in a timely manner.
It is necessary to align the performance of the key business processes that support the new digital business model to the strategic objectives, so that the time and resources necessary to improve those processes that help to achieve the strategic challenges are focused. Organizations need to be flexible, to be prepared for the different changes, but always oriented to their strategy, to align the behavior of the people towards the achievement of the defined strategic objectives. For this, the organization should be based on Balanced Score Card, which is based on facilitating the transformation of a company’s strategy into measurable and related operational objectives and key results, seeking the creation of value, and aligning the strategy with people, processes, resources, budget and client satisfaction.
Organizations that are deep-rooted in a culture of continuous innovation and improvement will remain the first ones to respond, adapt and evolve into the developing world of digital transformation.
The author is Head of Business Excellence, Transitions, Business Enablement, PMO & Corporate Reporting at SunLife ASCI.
