Building a Digital Future. Lipi Sarkar

Building a Digital Future - Lipi Sarkar


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organizations have not taken long to understand the urgent need for change and to become digitalized, but the big question that has been nagging CEOs and managing directors across the globe is “Where do we start?” on top of “Where should we focus first?” During these brainstorming sessions, their worries have been reinforced by examples of failed digital transformation projects.

      From my experience as a digital management consultant, organizations need to start by creating a digital strategy and a roadmap to start small, focusing primarily on the efficacy of productivity on their existing business model and operation and then finally moving on to innovation as a model for continuous improvement. We also need to look carefully into some of the core barriers that can become fatal to a digital transformation strategy if not resolved before starting any initiative.

       Consumer engagement. While consumer or clients sit at the heart of digital transformation, it is the utmost priority to engage with consumers first to understand areas that can accelerate or improve the consumer experience

       Cost efficiencies. We have all heard the phrase, “This software costs a fortune; we cannot afford it.” Indeed, the cost of implementation, maintenance, and licensing may become a big investment and the real ROI will most likely show up after user adoption. Hence there is a greater need to identify the business areas that can be made efficient that will eventually drive the growth of business, ensuring a cost-efficient investment.

       Resistance to change. Humans by nature subconsciously resist change, especially when changes are initiated or forced by the external environment. Therefore, before initiating any transformation strategies or plans, business leaders should proactively draft initial risk assessments, regularly measure and track engagement and commitment from the very early stages of any project, communicate their expectations openly and honestly, but, most importantly, identify opportunities to motivate employees to become part of the planning process.

       Old practices in a new environment. It is understandable that a digital transformation strategy is not solely the implementation of new systems but also the change in internal processes due to the ability to automate long and exhausting manual processes. Introducing the latest and most sophisticated technology without evaluating the old and setting new processes will certainly limit the potential of the whole endeavor.

       The right product or the vendor. For this subject, there should be an option to make a choice. There are many examples where organizations chose the vendor over the product due to strategic relationships or hidden agendas, which unsurprisingly led to failed projects and broken relationships. Choosing the right product that suits the business and users should be a careful and transparent process, where possible guided by almost agnostic professionals who don't affiliate with vendors but lead the selection process through their experience and base their conclusions on results. In terms of the vendor, the main aim is to choose the right technology partner rather than the implementer who will engage and eavesdrop on the needs of the organization and encourage them to achieve more.

      For an organization undergoing a digital transformation, selecting an implementation partner is a key decision. Usually, the selection of a partner is based on a tendering process fulfilling all key selection criteria. A good amount of time and due diligence needs to be factored in the selection process to identify the key strengths and weaknesses of the organization itself, which will contribute to selecting the right partner. However, after the partner is selected, many other factors need to be considered, both in terms of choosing the infrastructure and the technology. Having so many options in technologies and software available at the tip of your fingers, choosing the right solution for consumers who are not experienced and qualified can become the biggest nightmare of executives.

      Most vendors will present you with their product's unique selling points and will certainly promise you that their software not only “can do the job” but eventually will offer you functionalities that will transform your business operations holistically. Without a doubt this could potentially add more value to a business that suffers from bureaucracy or poor business flows, but more functionalities should not be considered a primary selection criterion when these functionalities add nothing but cost to the project budget. Microsoft is one of the technological leaders in this field and is clearly one of the market makers, continuously developing new capabilities to enable digital transformation across an organization’s key business process. The public product roadmap provides information about what will be made available in the next wave of product updates.

      We can highlight many great strengths within the Microsoft platform, like integrating with Cloud, integration with data, Power Apps, Power BI reporting, Finance & Operation, Supply Chain Management sized for large organizations, and Business Central for medium organizations, which make it an extremely attractive platform to support the digital transformation. The first is related to the completeness and integration of services and products. Virtually any requirement or problem that needs to be solved is already available within the stack of Microsoft products and services. A relevant aspect to adopting technology is that the products are natively integrated. A clear example of this is the integration between business applications and artificial intelligence. Microsoft has developed a series of services and functionalities using artificial intelligence technologies embedded within business applications, for example, within the sales application, so that users proactively know what the next best action is to consider, thus winning the business engagement since the sales engagement process is embedded within the functionalities.


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