The strategy is complete, implementation of the mobile application and
analytical system is finished, data scientists are providing useful analytical research. But is your enterprise getting the value out of your digital transformation investments?
A company’s culture, people, and business processes usually provide the largest barrier to realizing the value from digital investments. Yes, we talk about change management, however, most times that change management is involved in a one-time event like the implementation of ERP system or rolling out a new Salesforce application.
Once we have analytics in place providing insights into our digital endeavors, we are still not providing value to the company until a business process is changed. A few examples:
- Retail – Yes, price optimization has been in the market for a couple of decades. However, once you know a set of prices should be altered, there is an approval process, and changes to the POS have to be made to update the products pricing, store labor has to physically, and change the price tag on the shelves.
- Healthcare – One of the big trends in the healthcare today is early detection of the sepsis. Even if the predictive model can be automated, the resulting prediction (if it is positive), needs to be communicated down to the doctors and nurses that are caring for the patient.
- Oil and Gas – Drilling can generate over a 1TB a day in log and sensor data. Based on analytics, companies can maximize their oil production by keeping horizontal bores in the middle of oil rich rock, knowing when to create a new bore, or determining when fracking is required. Again the information needs to get to platform/well crew for it to be actionable.
In these cases, the change management is not a one-time thing. Change is constant. The business processes must be built to enable the analytical changes. Only then, can an enterprise realize the full benefit of the digital transformation.
