Navigating your North Star for Digital Transformation

IDG’s 2018 State of Digital Business Transformation report contains many fascinating insights on helping emerging or mature organizations evolve their digital business model.  Key takeaways included a closer inspection of technology strategies, organizational structures and process changes, and innovation leading to a more unique customer experience.

Given the pace of disruption, change and new learnings, how do organizations navigate their digital journey through this maze of competing interests.  Regardless of industry, they ask similar basic questions. Where do we start? Do we need to re-assess our capabilities involving people, processes and technology?  Or do we need to dig deeper into the organization examining how leadership teams effectively translate its vision across individual teams, business units, as well as more broadly across the company and industry?

GE Digital’s Digital Transformation Advisory (DTA) Services team is often called upon to help these emerging or mature organizations define and/or accelerate their digital transformation journey. As a trusted client advisor, we provide a focused set of consulting and transformative services with an emphasis on industrial digital.

Creating the right roadmap for transformation

The first step of this process begins with identifying an organization’s north star, defining it clearly, and determining whether it should apply to all business units, departments, and people to understand what achievement milestones they’re seeking.  This exercise is called visioning. Here, we conduct a two-day collaborative workshop that helps them articulate their desired business outcomes to give them a holistic digital assessment and strategic roadmap.

The next phase, digital roadmapping, enables organizations to assess their digital capabilities, identify innovative use cases, model the real value and priority of the use cases, and fully harness the power of digital technology to rethink every aspect of the organization—including those at the enterprise and/or solution-based software level. We apply design-thinking practices to identify use cases to understand their overall business impact and complexity to justify business investment. Organizations then use this information to define, prioritize and map out their digital transformation activities in an multi-generational digital roadmap, which could be 5, 10 or even 15 years depending on what the client is trying to accomplish.

The last phase, called organizational transformation services, involves specialized services to drive focus to the organization’s operating model, change management and communication planning activities. These services are designed to effectively manage the change that comes about throughout an organization’s digital transformation journey.

At the core of these three distinct phases is the north star. It serves as the guiding light in knowing what organizations want to define, measure and achieve. It aligns an organization at every level directionally, helping them navigate their journey in a more agile manner to reach key milestones associated with their digital transformation.