Many organizations evaluating to jump start the Digital transformation journey, have common questions:

— What should be the strategy? Or How to plan for Digital Transformation?What will be the ROI?

— What is the Go-To-Market Time?

— Impact on current Business Processes?

And so on and so forth.

Although these are very important questions to ask, but many fail to understand that there are several other questions which should be considered even before talking of Strategy, Planning and ROI.

In contrast, what all the office bearers should identify:

— What is the Vision Post-Digital Transformation?

— What are the KPI’s to measure success?

— Data Transformation (probably the most significant)

The first step is to define a Vision which will drive the necessary change to business models post-digital transformation. Organisations cannot have Old Vision with outdated Business processes and then expects miracle from the newly implemented system. Change is inevitable and so does the Business Models and Processes. The success of Digital transformation depends upon how soon the Organisation adapts to this change with a vision and prioritization.

While implementing a new model or a process, Organisations should be clear on how the success or failure of an idea/concept/solution will be measured. The KPIs will help understand the effectiveness of the change and slowly firm up the direction to move forward.

Most important aspect of this journey is Data Transformation. Today, every company is producing millions of records with tons of data sources. Do we consider this as a Data? Step back and analyse, is this a Data or just a Noise.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are the buzz words today. Every Organisation is keen to understand how these can change the way business is done. But the fundamental mistake Organisation does is not to cleanse the historical data and/or to have a strong Data governance process. To identify correct Data and incorrect Data is a huge challenge and a prerequisite, if you are planning for a digital change. If we feed incorrect data to any AI or ML algorithm, the output, needless to say will be a disaster. There is no Digital Transformation without Data Transformation.

In the end I would like to mention that, Intelligent Enterprise is a need of the hour, but there is a lot of ground to be covered before we call this journey a true “Transformation”.