The impact of Digital is intensifying across the world characterized by brands defined by customer experience and winners being determined not by scale but by innovation and agility. Information Technology plays a significant in Digital Re-imagination. In this post I will discussing the SIX FORCES of Digital Transformation Strategy. These forces are not in any specific order but cloud, automation and continuous delivery is paving way to hyper-connected world enabling Omni-channel customer experience and there by evolving new IT operating model. The following 6 forces help to set digital transformation journey and digital transformation roadmap on a right path.

1. Journey to the Cloud: Businesses now relies on IT based services as the foundation for new products and services and as the primary way to focus on customer value. It is also inherent that for meeting growth and profitability objectives, businesses requires higher levels of performance and agility from IT. Hence cloud adoption is becoming increasingly important for enabling organizations to make efficient and secure use of a pool of IT resources that can expand and contract based on the business needs in Digital journey.
2. Continuous Delivery: Continuous Delivery is the ability to get changes of all types – including new features, configuration changes, bug fixes and experiments – into production, or into the hands of users, safely and quickly in a sustainable way.
3. Business Process Automation: In Digital Age human labor is transitioning into digital labor. Business time-to-market is driven from minimizing human touch and ingraining automation across value chain. Robotics Process Automation and Cognitive Technologies are driving next-wave of business process automation.
4. Internet of Services: The ultimate objective of Internet of Things (IoT) is pave path to Internet of Services (IoS). Few analysts are projecting that reduced hardware cost, ubiquitous communication and IoT will lead to a service oriented community by 2030.
5. Omni-Channel Experience: At its core, omni-channel is defined as a multichannel sales approach that provides the customer with an integrated shopping experience. All the forces above combined expedite the Omni-channel customer experience.
6. New-Age IT Operating Model: Organization have to move away from traditional Plan-Build-Operate model of IT. New and disruptive technologies are impacting people, processes and governance of IT departments. So businesses are evolving new ways of running IT and ensuring the new operating models are meeting the many and varied challenges in digitally connected world.

Related Article: Algorithmic IT Operations (“AIOps”)

Recommended Reading

Digital Transformation: Survive and Thrive in an Era of Mass Extinction

From visionary Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tom Siebel comes a penetrating examination of the new technologies that are disrupting business and government—and how organizations can harness them to transform into digital enterprises. 

The confluence of four technologies – elastic cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things – writes Siebel, is fundamentally changing how business and government will operate in the 21st century.  

Siebel masterfully guides readers through a fascinating discussion of the game-changing technologies driving digital transformation and provides a roadmap to seize them as a strategic opportunity. He shows how leading enterprises such as Enel, 3M, Royal Dutch Shell, the U.S. Department of Defense, and others are applying AI and IoT with stunning results.

Digital Transformation is the guidebook every business and government leader needs to survive and thrive in the new digital age.