<p><em>Enterprises seeking Digital Transformation must create a focused organisation mandated to look for digital opportunities, says <strong>Suryaprakash K</strong></em><br><br>The world is growing increasingly digital. With over five billion mobile phone users, and data-traffic from mobile growing at an amazing rate of 26 per cent year-on-year, we are at the inflection point of digital adoption. This tectonic shift in consumer behavior demands businesses to increasingly focus on tapping the potential of this market.<br><br><strong>Going Digital</strong><br>As consumers go digital, markets get disrupted by digital-only startups like Airbnb, Nest, and Uber, who rapidly disrupt large businesses, in remarkably short periods. In order to survive and thrive, enterprises now have to identify digital opportunities through rapid imagination and execute the ideas through resilient execution.<br><br>Most 'digital-only' businesses have emerged from being garage startups to the most influential businesses worldwide in a matter of few years. These startups leverage social, mobile, local and data to deliver contextual and intuitive experiences. Uber combines mobility and localisation delivering valuable and differentiated service. Emerging areas like IoT (Internet of Things) provide opportunities that were unheard of earlier. The Nest thermostat that connects to the ecosystem to understand the consumer's usage pattern is a unique example of how you can re-imagine a business through Digital. Every enterprise wants to strike the next big idea and spend enormous amount of intellectual capital in ideating the next disruption and antidotes for the current disruption.<br><br>Ideation is a key ingredient of startups' success, but another key aspect to be considered here is that there isan alarming 93 per cent failure rate in startups. Success of start-ups does not comprise only of one winning idea - it also demandsrapid execution of multiple potential ideas to unearth thatone goldmine - this is theone characteristic large enterprises typically tend to lack and are reluctant to adopt.<br><br>Even large and successful born-digital firms test innovation, by applying data science, in form and function on a small segment of statistically significant users on an ongoing basis to improve products and services continuously, and then deploy the successful ones to scale.<br><br>Enterprises must hence focus on quick execution of ideas, in stark contrast tohow they have traditionally operated.They must translate strategy in-to an action plan, pour resources, and investments over complex multi-year transformation programs, and measure success with returns defined in the business plan.<br><br>However, Digital Transformation movesto a different beat as it is in a space where forces driving the ecosystem are in a state of constant flux. The environment it operates in, the devices on which it works, the winning themes - they could all be redundant in a longer time-to-market.<br><br><strong>What It Takes To Be Successful In Digital?</strong><br>Successful Digital Transformation projectsare rapidly executed, in a constant state ofimprovisation, and are envisioned ascross-functional, customer-centric user stories. These initiatives are usually self-funding, iterative processesand are not a big-bang change.<br><br>Digital Transformation spansacross all aspects of the organisation including strategy, marketing structure, and culture. Digital catalyzes reengineering of established businesses, unlockingnovel ways of doing business and newer revenue models.<br><br>Enterprises seeking Digital Transformation must create a focused organisation mandated to look for digital opportunities. Traditional organizations, encumbered with siloes are rarely able to imagine and executethe big picture of end-customer delight. A dedicated Digital organizationbridges the chasm between market needs and existing structure. The team to manage and execute such initiatives should comprise of personnel who are aware of existing open source tools, designing solutions that are both easy to construct and can elastically expand to enterprise-scale once proven. The talent pool for this skill-set is in short supply and to make up for this, large enterprises adopt an acqui-hire strategy.<br><br><strong>Executing Digital In Speed</strong><br>Digital Transformation initiatives begin with identifying a gap andbridging it either by incrementally enhancing existing capabilities, or with a completely new disruptive offering or business model leveraging digital. This involves looking at every touch-point, trying out multiple features on different set of users and continuously improving the product through multiple releases in a single day with agile software development facilitated by digital tools and technologies.<br><br>DevOpsteams make this happen bycombining development and deployment into a seamless bundle so that nothing breaks as the enterprise embarks on a continuous evolution.<br><br>At the onset, a broad objective is defined such as "improve the customer onboarding process by 30% through digital tools". Then multiple strategies are identified, and few are shortlisted to be tried. A successful Digital Transformation is fearless, path breaking, and not afraid to disrupt existing businesses.<br><br>The focus is to execute in sprints with duration of 6 to 8 weeks so thatresults are quickly collected, and interventions that do not work as envisaged are discarded. An initiative can scale up to the entire customer base once it fulfills the strategic objectives laid out.<br><br>Successful enterprises quickly execute, discard the failures, and evolve iteratively upon successes. This enables enterprises to adapt to the Digital age and unlock newer revenue opportunities, open new markets and delight customers with intuitive experience.<br><br>The future belongs to enterprises that ride the digital wave. It will be a survival of the nimblest.<br><br><em>The author is SVP and Head - Digital at Infosys</em></p>
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