Let’s break it down, starting with the word ‘digital’. It might be easier if I give you my interpretation of what it doesn’t mean in this context. Digital does not refer to the creation of new websites, the addition of e-commerce stores, getting likes, retweets or social posts or even the use of technology.
What does digital mean in this context?
The word digital is a synonym for the pace of change that’s occurring in today’s world driven by the rapid adoption of technology. This is putting existing organisations under tremendous pressure, in many cases driving them into the land of irrelevance. Some are seeing the signs while others don’t. Because of rapid technology adoption, how our customers engage with us is changing the operating system of how we create new sustainable competitive advantage and how we must change if we are to keep pace.
We are seeing two types of organisations, those that are just doing digital and a new kind of digital innovators. The digital innovators are winning, and they are disrupting every conceivable marketplace enabled by this new technology adoption. The biggest mistake we are seeing is that many organisations are merely digitising existing services and calling it digital transformation. It’s not.
So what is digital transformation?
Digital transformation is a journey of strategically planned, organisational change. It starts by empowering our teams with new methods to create a highly responsive strategy and fearless culture of innovation. It is the right leadership that creates the high-performing innovative organisations which are delivered by marketers and technologists principally. This is digital transformation!
