The key to David Bowie’s longevity, along with many of his contemporaries, was his ability to reinvent himself. Bowie, just like any business, did not want to lose his ‘popular’ status and recognized the importance of moving with the times. For this reason he changed and evolved his image over the years, from psychedelic to glam rock artist to pop icon, and in doing so maintained his appeal to generation after generation.
Today, we are exposed to a wealth of evolving trends. From digital, consumerization, one-click culture, expectation economy and so on. I will try to put these phenomena into a business context, illustrate their importance and highlight how they are affecting us.
CEOs and CIOs face ongoing new challenges and need to bring IT and the business closer together. They need to work hand in hand to establish how new digital lines of business can quickly be created. Some of the most common situations that they will need to address are:
My Takeaway: Digital transformation is first and foremost about people, helping these people to embrace the change. Protect your teams and don’t let them feel threatened.
The first place to look for value, is within the organization’s existing assets. These are investments that the organization has already made in culture, expertise, and resources and they currently generate operating income for the firm. Bear in mind that most of the economic or business innovations stem from little ideas. These affect the way you organize your business, including the way you offer customer promotions for example.
My Takeaway: When we talk about valuation, it is the way companies measure and manage their values. Companies create value by investing capital at rates of return that exceed their cost of capital. Companies thrive when they create real economic value for their stakeholders.
From our experience, we find that companies are already aware of the current digitization trends and at an executive level they are embracing changes to adopt flexible and scalable models faster.
What you need to do is “Plan value generating projects early”
Which areas within your company can you quickly bring value to? With today’s technology, you can apply data mining techniques to your processes to discover where you will get the best return on your investments. Ensure that you take feasibility and stakeholder value into account in this equation.
Close the gap between business expectations and delivered value by embracing proof of concepts. With cloud technology and pre-assembled scenarios, you can quickly validate project feasibility.
Nowadays, we are all exposed to an avalanche of information: new products, new solutions, and new methodologies. We believe that one of the secrets for a successful transformation, is to have an integration strategy in place to minimize disruption whilst adopting innovations, enhancing your product feature, or implementing new best of breed tools for an optimal customer engagement experience.
Embrace the ch-ch-ch changes
“Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes Turn and face the strange”