Digital transformation is changing many aspects of the way we live and work today at an incredible pace. Keeping up to date with the newest stories in digital can take up a lot of your valuable time and it's not always easy to discern what the insight is for your business.
To help out, we've curated our favorite digital transformation articles from the past seven days combined with our own insights.
Read on to get up to speed.
1) 13 Ways CIOs Are Tackling Digital Disruption and Embracing Disruptive Technology
This interesting article from CIO.com outlines 13 pieces of advice from top CIOs and CTOs on how your business can cope with the threat of digital disruption.
For us, the key insights are:
- 'Get Agile' - in the article, this point refers to taking a proactive approach and becoming the disruptor in your industry. We'd take it down a level and advise taking an agile approach to any digital project within your business. In our experience, having the flexibility to adapt your project as it develops, making changes where necessary, could be the difference between its success or failure.
- 'Be a Leader' - this is a great point, emphasising that anyone leading digital transformation must possess vision and industry insight. This quote says it all - "The CIO must be an organisational leader, not the Head of IT and this is a mindset not a position."
2) Why Consumers Abandon Digital Brands
With the rising volumes of branded content online, it's clear that some companies are better than others at gaining the trust of their online customers. New research suggests that there are three important reasons why consumers distrust brands online:
- Inaccurate content (91%)
- Frequent website downtime (88%)
- Overly simple identity and authentication procedures (75%)
What's really interesting about the results is their relation to digital privacy and security. As customers become more comfortable making purchases online, they are also becoming more informed about digital security. If you're selling to consumers online, it's your job to reassure them they can trust you, your content and your digital destinations.
3) The Disruption of Sales in the Age of the Empowered Customer
Digital disruption isn't limited to your IT and marketing teams - in fact, far from it. A new report by Salesforce proves that sales teams which embrace technology consistently deliver higher results.
Salesforce CDO, Vala Afshar, outlined his top findings:
- Top teams are 3.5x more likely to use sales analytics
- Nearly 60% of high performers already use or are planning to use a mobile sales app
- High performers are nearly 8x more likely to be heavy tech adopters
- Achieving sales excellence takes a village. High performers are nearly 3x more likely than underperformers to view sales as 100% the responsibility of the entire organisation.
The evidence is clear, using data to understand your customer delivers results.
4) Digital Transformation: Separating Reality from the Hype
One of the biggest obstacles digital transformation faces is its tendency to be viewed as a digital fad or buzzword. If you're guilty of reducing it to such terms, you're guilty of missing the digital opportunity.
This Linkedin article does a good job of giving guidance on distinguishing digital transformaiton as an opportunity, not a catchphrase. It also includes an interesting set of identifiers for digital transformation:
- A new customer experience
- A new business model
- A new value creation model
5) Is Your Service Good Enough to Survive Digital Transformation?
Another interesting angle on digital transformation lies in talent and skills. Planning and executing an important piece of digital work will rely heavily on the skills of your people, and how well you are able to deploy those skills.
Digital strategist Mike Connor warns that the ability of your business to thrive in a digital world will be compromised by a skills gap:
"The key to surviving—and thriving—as a company will be to continually deepen and broaden the company’s skills in using digital technologies to help customers achieve high value outcomes and experiences more effectively."
The full article gives valuable insight into digital transformation as a whole - well worth a read.
6) Companies Are Underestimating Digital Disruption
A mixed bag in new research reveals that although companies are undertaking digital transformation projects to improve customer experience, almost 53% admitted they had underestimated the disruption of such activity.
This is interesting and confirms a lot of what we know through our own work, that the need to transform is understood but there is often a huge gap between ideas and execution.
Other insights include:
- More than half of business agreed that ‘digital transformation is hampered by poor quality data across the business’ (53%)
- 54% of companies underestimated the level of data management issues around their transformation
- ‘Finding the right data’ (70%) and ‘inconsistent data’ (62%) were cited as the top two challenges in terms of data management when undergoing digital transformational activities
What do you think of the articles we've chosen? Do you have any to add?