I have been listening to an audio book called “Cell” by author Robin Cook. This is a medical thriller about a doctor, George Wilson, whose life revolves around an innovation that is devastating and plays a critical role in his entire life and the people he loved. A large company creates a smartphone app that acts as a primary care physician taking on a new role in the digital transformation of healthcare after Obamacare opened up opportunities for new enrollments. However, the story takes a turn when George discovers that all the patients including his fiancé have died in direct 
relation to the app as they are beta patients. George’s goal is to follow the truth and figure out the reality.
While I don’t want to spoil anything for you, what is interesting about this story is the digital reality of patients submerged into a digital app and their interactions. In reality, digital experience has been a priority to all industries including healthcare, retail, banking, and others. Patients want to have an app that keeps track of their health record and proactively provides them notifications on treatment options for health and wellness. Physicians want an app that has the ability to provide them knowledge base, reach out to peers upon emergency, or just use it to keep track of their patients. Store managers want an app that can keep track of their inventory and keep their store stocked with an ability to interact with their vendors for refill. Customer services reps want to know everything there is about their customers when their phone rings.
Knowledge is power when you apply it correctly
While the fictional digital transformation in “Cell” might have went awry, there are ways to make your digital transformation a success. Perficient’s Chief Strategist recently compiled an e-book that discusses “How to Make Digital Transformation Gains in 2019.” In it, they share their advice on sustaining digital momentum and building a foundation for future success. Here are some key takeaways where data platforms can support an enterprise transformation to create a customer obsessed digital platform that can provide AI driven insights for your competitive advantage.
- Start Small | Find the right use case for AI and/or digital transformation which will add significant value to the enterprise.
- Know your Customer | Master data about your customer is the key to digital transformation. No customer wants to have different messages in different devices about the same product. In contrast, high profile customers would like to have a personal touch in their interaction with the organization they do business with especially in retail and financial services.
- Architect & Build Your Data Platform | Data platform is a logical construct which gives clear architecture and governance instructions in hosting any volume, veracity, velocity, and variety of data.
- Governance is a key function of Data Assets | With self-service data, BI, and AI capabilities, Governance is at a critical juncture for a CDO to create the process to secure, monitor, and deliver data on time for effective decision making.
- Agile Data Delivery | If you have a culture of delivering products in an agile fashion, why would data be any different? A product which has several data points need to be considered an agile release as decided by the data patterns (e.g. Reference data release management).
- Internet of Everything (IoET)| Big data has become so mature that cloud providers provide PaaS options for streaming and analytics. Don’t waste time in building brand new ingestion framework or analytics framework. Focus on “what data” you are ingesting and “why and what” business problem you are trying to solve. Get to the data at-time/on-time using the available framework from Perficient.
