The coming together of technology and business in a way that alters your organization to become more resilient in the digital era.
In a world where the pace of change is accelerating, with heightened customer expectations and new, nimble competitors quickly unseating established enterprises, the old ways of working won’t cut it. Digital transformation is an effort to make established enterprises fit for the digital age.
Digital transformation harnesses technology to accelerate and advance business outcomes, evolving your organization to be more resilient in the digital era.
Improved ability for your organization to thrive in the face of uncertainty and an ever-evolving technology landscape.
It is hard and there is no end-state: digital transformation is an on-going process.
Digital transformation programs are typically undertaken by established enterprises seeking to improve their ability to react to market stimulus. It requires enterprises to look at technology as a strategic asset and key differentiator, rather than just an enabler.
What is it?
Digital transformation is the coming together of technology and business, evolving your organization to be more resilient in the digital era. It fundamentally changes how you operate: how work is created and measured, how teams are formed, how decisions are made.
In terms of this transformation process, there isn’t one single end point: it is an ongoing evolution of your business, nudging itself toward market opportunities and changes.
The digital era is characterized by the impact of technology and the speed of change, which is increasing ambiguity but also creating new business models and scale. Digital transformation is about becoming resilient to this era, not just about implementing a technology, creating a product or automation. It’s a fundamental shift in how we live and work.
Transformation activity typically involves:
- modernizing legacy architecture — both business and technology
- creating new digital products, services and customer interactions
- improving engineering practices and disciplines
- introducing modern operations around organizational design, funding practices, talent development, recruiting and portfolio management
- intelligent use of data to improve decision making, personalization and product development
- partnering, cooperating and collaborating with the ecosystem of other digital platforms and products that extend your reach and/or offer convenience to your customers without you having to build everything
What’s in for you?
A thorough digital transformation program will enable you to compete in the digital era by:
- Improving your ability to address ever-changing, heightened customer expectations, build intimacy and gain competitive advantage
- Accelerating the delivery of new products and services to your customers
- Enabling you to embrace emerging technologies and unique business processes that make new opportunities possible
- Building enterprise resilience, which increases your ability to respond, pivot and sustain through uncertainty.
- Potential for extensibility and scalability within and beyond your enterprise through collaboration and partnerships
What are the trade offs?
It requires the modernization of legacy systems, operating models and leadership thinking. Dealing with all three can be hard and the decisions you face as you unpick the business can be confronting. You need to evaluate whether you have the skills needed in-house.
Transformation is not an end state; it becomes an ongoing muscle, teaching the business how to learn and adapt all of the time.
How is it being used?
Digital transformation is reshaping how work is created and measured, how teams are formed, how decisions are made, and the adoption of new and emergent technology.
Legacy systems, weighty processes, and siloed teams traditionally drag responsiveness over time. TELUS, Canada’s fastest-growing telecommunications company, wanted to reverse this aging process — blending teams, technology and culture in a way that lets it accelerate even as it grows.
TELUS Digital’s mission is delightful in its simplicity: enable customers and team members to do what they want to do, easily. That means technology and process should remove undue suffering, not contribute to it.
It’s transformation program has made it easy for TELUS to add new technologies, services and partners as expectations evolve. TELUS teams now deploy in a matter of hours and ship hundreds of changes every day (up from a few changes several times a week). A standardized approach to capturing and storing data makes it easier for team members to report and make data-based decisions.
Related topics
Would you like to suggest a topic to be decoded?
Just leave your email address and we'll be in touch the moment it's ready.