Lift the hood, and you’ll see a platform that looks different than the old one, but a business that works in largely the same way.
Ro Antao is Cloud & Digital Lead and Executive Board Member, PwC Australia.
That’s because planning and execution of digital transformation is often treated as an IT project and handballed to technology teams accordingly.
Unsurprisingly, IT focuses on the change levers that they can pull with certainty — including platform migrations, digitisation of manual processes, and siloed innovations.
Reimagine the possible
While there are cost-reduction benefits that can be achieved, is this sufficient to truly transform the business? Despite the best intentions, many of today’s digital transformation journeys have become long roads to equivalency — and expensive ones at that.
If you’ve had similar outcomes, ask yourself: how are these investments helping to improve customer experience? How are they increasing revenue? How are they empowering new ways of working? How do they support your Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) commitments?
Focus on building new forms of competitive advantage rather than just digitising what you did in the past.
As my colleagues point out in their publication, Beyond Digital, this requires leaders asking fundamental questions about the definition of value — and what is their organisation’s place in a digital economy.
They fundamentally need to understand that the business doesn’t need a digital strategy.
It needs a business strategy for the digital age.
This requires a true partnership between business and technology executives — one that is based on co-creation, and not order-taking.
This is the bedrock of value creation, combining a deep understanding of business challenges and trends with an understanding of how emerging technologies and data provide new ways of addressing them.
To drive transformative change, this collaboration cannot be a one-time event but an iterative process that extends into the fabric of how the organisation delivers.
The right approach soon identifies transformative business cases that turn long-running, inefficient processes on their heads.
Cloud-based data platforms, for example, are helping governments break down silos between agencies and departments — helping to improve public safety, streamline operations, and build future policy by collecting and utilising data that is collected widely and readily accessible.
Accelerating forward
Cloud contact centres are successfully combining business acceleration, operational efficiencies and improved customer experience using machine learning and automation to slash “time to value” for customer and employee digital channels.
After spending nearly two decades in Silicon Valley, I have watched digital natives challenging tech behemoths that have tried, with varying degrees of success, to disrupt and reinvent themselves.
While incremental change can be driven with strong management, driving strategic change requires courageous, humble and purpose-led leadership.
Maximising business value can start with simple steps forward — starting with tapping a community of solvers to imagine ways the business can operate more efficiently, then translate that into use cases promising real business value.
Next, work with business and technology leaders to refine proofs-of-concept for a subset of those use cases, providing opportunities to derive early value from the transformation and focus on future work.
As you identify the most effective elements of your transformation, you can create a “north star” to guide and illustrate what the broader transformation should look like over time.
Finally, work with technologists to build an integration platform that enables the business to decouple from the old and transition to the new — while creating an engine for digital innovation.
Forget the missteps of the past: anything becomes possible once you stop thinking about digital strategy in a vacuum, and engage the right people to help you deliver your business strategy for the digital age.
At PwC, we are a community of solvers. Our team includes strategists, consultants, accountants, engineers, designers and data scientists — who combine human ingenuity, experience and technology innovation to deliver sustained outcomes and build trust.
Ro Antao is Cloud & Digital Lead and Executive Board Member, PwC Australia.
