Transforming your Sales and Service Model

Are you ready to take on a bold sales and service model transformation? Now is the time to reinvent your model and integrate the value your business provides into the “new” societal landscape post the global disruption of Covid-19. In today’s environment, your successful sales and service transformation will be enabled by strong leadership, facts driven from data and analytical insights, and new approaches to technology.

It is important that you remain flexible and resilient while looking to the future - redefine your operations so that you can emerge stronger than your competitors. You must pivot your sales and service models in response to the new societal landscape - purchasing power is shifting fast, the demand for digital channels is rising. To retain customers, protect revenues and realign go-to-market investments you must pivot your sales and service model to meet the constantly changing expectations of your customers.

Hold tight and embrace the uncertainty – be courageous and apply a different approach to how you would usually gain market share all while monitoring the shift in consumer demands to ensure you are ahead of the competition.

Below are the key considerations for redesigning your sales and service model:

• Rediscover your customer - understand your customers so that you can meet their evolving wants and needs so that you can remain relevant

• Redefine the sales and service journey – segment your customers and focus your efforts on the strongest and most profitable opportunities

• Enhance your product/service offering to meet customer expectations - reinvent through new narratives, approaches and terms, and diversify dynamic offers

• Enable your team with the tools and skills to succeed in today’s digital age – ensure you provide your team with the key enablers that they need to support them in being successful  including training and coaching, sales tools, technology

• Reward your sales and service resources for the right behaviour/outcomes – align on priorities, determine the metrics to monitor, measure performance and reward success to keep your workforce motivated

If you need help with transforming your sales and service model to meet the needs of customers in today’s environment, please reach out to Whiteark for a no obligation consultation and we can help you navigate your future to success.

Linking transformation to strategy

In today’s business environment, transformation can take many forms but no matter the type it revolves around the need to generate new value - unlock new opportunities, drive new growth, deliver new efficiencies.

It is critical that the transformation project aligns to the company’s strategy – strategy is fundamental in guiding/aligning decisions and actions to ensure they support the achievement of the company’s strategic goals. A sound strategy helps shape an executable transformation objective.

The value that your transformation project will create/deliver must be aligned to your company strategy and it will help with articulating desired transformation outcomes, from a financial perspective or from an operational perspective.

Once you have aligned your transformation ambition you can build out your transformation program. 

THE STEPS

1. Clearly defined company strategy

2. Determine your company strategic priorities

3. Define your transformation ambition – ensure it aligns to your company strategy/strategic priorities

4. Get leaders involved

5. Build your transformation plan

6. Be clear on what success is

7. Gather resources and expertise

8. Choose the right enablers

9. Focus on culture and change management

10. Measure success

For more support on transformation please explore our range of thought leadership articles…

Digital Transformation: Part 2

Article written by Pete Crawford

Executing Digital Transformation

This is the second of two articles on digital transformation. The first piece illustrated several components – relating to employee experience, customer experience, operations and business models – that offer transformational opportunities. Here, we will describe a framework to orchestrate and execute these opportunities.

“Insights from Pete Crawford | Head of Data, Analytics & AI, Pete Crawford spends his day-to-day leading strategy, governance and execution over enterprise data platforms, data science and AI capabilities. Speaking at leading industry AI and data events, Pete is experienced in forming and directing multi-disciplined teams to manage enterprise information assets and deliver business outcomes through advanced analytics.”

Digital Transformation Execution Depends on Cultural Change

Just as the approach to digital transformation requires a strategic, cross-functional and customer-focused mindset – rather than a focus on technological outputs – the success of execution depends on embracing new orientations:

i)      Transformational change is ongoing and cultural, not finite or punctuated like a project.[i]

ii)     Delivery is a series of agile enterprise-wide micro-transformations, not one ‘big bang’.

iii)   Achievement is the creation of a modern enterprise that is inclusive; genuinely committed to sustainability; and able to handle data at scale – not just a digital platform connected to a new business model.

The big question, of course, is why not just follow traditional change management principles and best practices as a digital transformation execution strategy? However, while there are many overlaps, traditional change methodologies typically follow a beginning-end pattern. The nature of digital transformation is also dynamic, interdependent and contingent on network interactions both inside and outside of the organisation. Not accommodating these factors has contributed to a 70% failure rate of transformation initiatives and sustained success in a only 16% of cases[ii]. What emerges is an approach to orchestrating successful transformation based on five main themes.

Digital Transformation Execution Framework

Theme	What Needs to be Answered?	Components
1. Strategic Foundation	Why is change necessary? What is the end goal? How are we going to get there?	• Vision and communications • Investment and commitment • Targets and tracking
2. Operating Model Choices	How are we going to organise and coordinate the transformation?	• Traditional PMO? • Transformational office? • Product-led transformation?
3. Data and Technology Ecosystem Needs	Does the technology stack help transform the customer experience and does the data ecosystem transform the employee experience?	• Data strategy • Data infrastructure • Data literacy and privacy
4. Workforce Needs	Do we have the tools and the talent at all levels of the organisation to fully leverage new opportunities?	• Digital tools • Data skills • Coaching, learning and hiring
5. Ways of Working	Is the entire organisation aligned and equipped to accelerate and sustain transformational capabilities?	• Cross-functional • Customer networked • Experiment and urgency

The Themes of Transformational Execution

1. Strategic Foundation

Not unlike any major initiative or program, orchestrating a digital transformation starts with a series of strategic choices. These choices either affect how ideas are embraced within an organisation – in which case they establish a new set of cultural norms – or they are resisted. Gaining acceptance means:

• Having a clear business strategy. The transformation can only be validated if it structurally aligned and measured in accordance with the wider business strategy.

• Link investment to clear, ambitious targets. Conveying external benchmarks, establishing exponential change targets and issuing timelines are crucial signals of strategic importance.

• Communicating strategic context to reinforce the urgency, commitment and significance of the transformation targets. Employees and business partners need to be fully immersed and committed to a clear narrative which articulates why change is necessary and what the end state will look like. Inevitably, this produces tension between challenging targets, autonomous teams who are accountable for results and the development of workforce capabilities. Communications needs to acknowledge these tensions and resolve them by being:

  • Audience specific (investors; government regulators; customer/user education; talent/recruitment; internal employees).

  • Customer-centric with an emphasis on customer needs and jobs to be done.

  • Customised to employee roles to help them adapt their own jobs and beliefs and, in particular, addressing transformation as a threat by discussing training paths to upgrade expertise.

  • Augmented by access to authoritative documentation (reasoning; goals; expected timeline with constraints; resources and points of contact).

• Setting cross-organisational metrics and markers of digital progress. The most relevant measures typically address aspects such as digital ROI; time to market of digital apps; and track whether key talent has been attracted, promoted and retained.

• Presenting a simple outcome-oriented transformation roadmap. The role of the roadmap is to prioritise and promote three to five initiatives that can be scaled to change customer behaviour.

2. Operating Model Choices

In simple terms, an operating model is the conduit between strategy, technology stack, development environment, and the organisation of talent to achieve business outcomes. At the centre of the operating model the question of how best to organise and coordinate targets, performance metrics, leadership, and scope across workstreams. Four main approaches emerge to closing the gap between strategy and execution. These approaches are summarised below.

• A dedicated transformation hub. This is a good option when transformation is enterprise wide and no single business function has the experience to coordinate the scope or speed of parallel workstreams. Advantages include:

  • Direct translation of corporate strategy into digital priorities.

  • Centralised strategic planning, cost control and procurement over innovative technologies.

  • Governance and communications ‘nerve centre’.

  • Leverages specialisation and expertise over multiple use cases.

  • Integrates with other centre of excellence models (i.e. AI, RPA).

• Product-led transformation. This option can be considered if the organisation has already established an effective information product management function built around strong data and analytics capabilities. Advantages include:

  • Pre-existing cross-functional navigation.

  • Geared to identify and understand customers (internal and external).

  • Experiment and prototype mindset to assist with speed-to-market.

  • Can be cross-pollinated with domain experts to build a lean, learning culture.

  • Funding a team rather than a project aids sequencing of initiatives.

• A standard project management office. This option is constrained by primarily working within the context of a business function or silo. This approach only warrants consideration if investment is significant but not strategic. Not recommended.

• The digital innovation lab. This is an option taken when organisations seek to experiment, learn and place multiple bets without large up-front investments. It is also synonymous with internal entrepreneurial divisions. While this approach may be valuable for ‘incubating’ transformational strategies such as new business models it is not recommended as a way of orchestrating transformational delivery. These types of units often have weak connections to core IT or lines of business.

3. Data and Technology Ecosystem Needs

The adoption of cloud-native data management platforms aimed at consolidating transactional, interactive and social data are central to the promise of digital transformation. Data platforms, supporting analytics capabilities embedded at a business domain level, are a transformational source of customer intelligence and innovation. Data architecture and infrastructure requirements can be as modest as business intelligence systems or as ambitious as the convergence of analytical and operational ecosystems that feed machine learning frameworks. In either case, choosing the right data analytics capability is paramount. In this sense, execution relies on:

• Understanding the context and demands on the data ecosystem.

  This requires discovering:

  • How the organisation decides when to collect data or purchase external data?

  • What types of data are collected and what is the primary source for each type?

  • Which stakeholders are the nominal ‘owners’ of each data source?

  • How granular is each data source? How has it been used in the past? Are usage events tracked?

  • Is there a unifying element (i.e. customer_id) that joins different data sources for data modelling purposes?

  • What tools and processes are available to move data between systems and formats?

  • How are the data sources accessed by different groups of users?

  • What data access tools are available? How many people use each of these tools, and what are their positions?

  • How are users informed of new and changed data elements?

  • How are decisions made regarding data access restrictions? By whom? Based on what criteria? How is this tracked?

  • What analytic tools have been tried?

  • How have the results of this analysis been judged? What were the metrics and benchmarks?

Ensuring that data strategy and data privacy management is supported by infrastructure best practice.

Weak Infrastructure	Strong Infrastructure	Comments
Siloed	Interoperable	Systems can be easily integrated
Proprietary	Open Source	Systems can be easily replaced and are not vendor dependent
Bespoke	Off-the-Shelf	No vendor lock-in or inflated pricing
Hosted In-house	Cloud	Reduced cost and secure, remote access
Hyper-specialised analytics units	Self-Service Insights	Analyst tools are becoming available to non-technical users
Irregular Data Formats	Standardised APIs	Data can be easily shared
Ad-hoc Security	Privacy-by-Design and Differential Privacy	Data platforms are protected from abuse of personal data with built-in governance mechanisms

4. Workforce Needs

Much of the strategic foundations, operational planning and technology ecosystem of digital transformation will go to waste unless there is universal user readiness, tool adoption and a collective commitment to sharing relevant information. To this end, organisations must activate a culture of continuous learning in the areas of:

• The identification and acquisition of data skills. To unlock the full value of data there needs to be a fundamental skills framework featuring:

  • Defining data.

  • Classifying data.

  • Improving data usability.

  • Understanding data visualisations.

  • Communicating evidence to decision makers.

  • Why data privacy matters and how privacy practices affect employees, customers and partners.

• The availability and implementation of digital tools. Digital self-service coupled with self-sufficiency in using tools make the power of transformation innovations accessible. The adoption of particular tools depends on business context but can include:

  • Messaging and virtual design or content collaboration.

  • Real-time data workflow and tracking management.

  • Self-service data analytics.

  • Dashboards connected to centralised data platforms.

  • Learning management systems to create training courses. 

• Coaching and talent identification to encourage the growth of new behaviours. Data skills and digital tools alone are not going to achieve cultural change or the creation of a continuous learning culture. Empowered employees, collaboration and urgency depends on distributed leadership and effective responsibility existing at all levels of the organisation. This requires:

  • Leadership development programs to challenge old ways of working.

  • Prioritising coaching to help team members grow through structured one-on-one sessions.

  • Having leaders dedicate time on hiring goals based on identified specific skill gaps.

  • Treat learning as a deliberate practice by providing immediate task feedback to individuals as in the form of small lessons taught by the most talented colleagues. Repeatedly reinforce positive behaviour.

  • Set OKRs for cultural change and track them relentlessly. Measures include the percentage of workforce actively involved in cross-functional teams; recognition of people who collaborate; and cultural gap identification with the use of assessment instruments.

5. Ways of Working

Ways of working is the articulation of culture across an organisation. A sustainable environment for digital transformation execution is cross-functional; experimental (and, equally importantly, tolerates data-informed failure); and operates with a sense of urgency. A number of traits contribute to embedding this culture:

• Leveraging internal knowledge networks.

• Eliciting and sharing in-depth input from customers.

• Sequencing transformation workstreams to focus on one business domain at a time (maximising ROI).

• Utilising similar datasets, technology solutions and team members for multiple use cases to reduce expense.

• Applying agility by investing in high-fidelity prototypes anchored in data to validate risk as early as possible.

In conclusion, we can consolidate many of the themes and components necessary to orchestrate a successful digital transformation using a simple roadmap example.

---

FOOTNOTES

[i] A notable 63% of respondents (from 690 organisations) ranked cultural challenges as the biggest impediment to transformational efforts, Harvard Business Review, Rethinking Digital Transformation, November 2019.

[ii] ‘Unlocking success in digital transformations’, McKinsey survey, 29 October 2018.

LOOKING TO Leverage and utilise your data? REACH OUT.

Whiteark is not your average consulting firm, we have first-hand experience in delivering transformation programs for private equity and other organisations with a focus on people just as much as financial outcomes.

We understand that execution is the hardest part, and so we roll our sleeves up and work with you to ensure we can deliver the required outcomes for the business. Our co-founders have a combined experience of over 50 years’ working as Executives in organisations delivering outcomes for shareholders. Reach out for a no obligation conversation on how we can help you.

Article by Pete Crawford

Digital Transformation: Part 1

Article written by Pete Crawford

Transforming Key Strategic Capabilities

This is the first of two articles on digital transformation. Here, we will look at how the digital economy has reconfigured the business value chain and its effect on four key strategic capabilities – employees, customers, operations, and business models. Understanding the transformational components of these capabilities offers revenue maximisation and cost optimisation opportunities. In the second article we will examine execution and orchestration in order to take advantage of these opportunities.

“Insights from Pete Crawford | Head of Data, Analytics & AI, Pete Crawford spends his day-to-day leading strategy, governance and execution over enterprise data platforms, data science and AI capabilities. Speaking at leading industry AI and data events, Pete is experienced in forming and directing multi-disciplined teams to manage enterprise information assets and deliver business outcomes through advanced analytics.”

Digital Transformation is Strategic, Cross-Functional and Customer Focused

The term ‘transformation’ is not incidental. It is far more powerful than ‘change’. It implies creating something entirely new. The recent wave of innovative technologies – such as managed cloud services; data platforms, natural language understanding; computer vision; robotics; machine learning; and blockchain – have been accelerated by forced experiments owing to the COVID pandemic. However, technology adoption is the wrong way to frame opportunities. Instead, digital transformation can be distinguished from earlier eras of business transition in that:

i) Strategy, not technology, is the driver.

ii) Cross-functional business processes, not only IT infrastructure, are the enablers.

iii) Competing for attention to create direct customer relationships, not competing to create exclusive supplier relations, is the focus.

Data is the Strategic Asset Shaping the Scope of Transformation

A second factor distinguishing digital transformation is the emergence of the ‘digital economy’ and the notion of data as a strategic asset. To be clear, data is not analogous to models of ownership or the utilisation of physical commodities[1]. Succeeding with any digital transformation program will ultimately demand managing, governing, using and sharing data to create value. It helps to start from an understanding of the unique characteristics of information:

• Data is non-depletable.

• Data is non-rivalrous (millions can use it simultaneously and a single piece of data can be used by multiple algorithms, analytics or applications at once).

• Data can become less relevant, and less valuable, over time.

• Value can multiply when aggregated and analysed with other relevant data.

• The price of data is often indeterminate of supply and demand.

• Data is not only personal to us but is also created through interactions with other people or services; therefore, data has both a private and a social value (i.e. COVID tracking apps).

• Data can influence our own behaviour through feedback mechanisms (i.e. wearable tech and fitness trackers).

The notion of data as an asset, and an adjunct to innovative technologies, is illuminated by the real-time monitoring of environmental variables derived from Internet of Things (IoT) applications. For example, the insurance and energy sectors have embraced embedded sensors. Innovative automotive insurers have been able to improve forecasting and claim reviews by monitoring driving habits accumulated over millions of kilometres of driving data. The collection of attributes, such as speed, acceleration, braking and turning motions, has also ensured that they are able to base premiums on personalised behaviours rather than general inferences. Ironically, however, sensors are expensive to fix when cars do crash – contributing to raising insurance rates.

The Business Value Chain Has Been Reconfigured

The confluence of digitalisation and technological innovation has not only disrupted consumer habits but has reconfigured the business value chain. For many organisations, the point of integration in the value chain on which their sustainable differentiation is built has changed. Consequently, digital transformation has become inescapable when reckoning with a new set of competitive forces that affect how goods or services are supplied, distributed and consumed.

Reconfiguration of supply

Suppliers and content creators, especially those with differentiated product, niche focus and high quality, can attempt to attract consumers directly to avoid the risk of becoming commodified or abandoned. For example, musicians are using StageIt to distribute their performance to reach widely distributed audiences. Or The New York Times, which remains profitable (with a wider reach) by adopting a paywall and subscription model to counter decimated advertising revenues in traditional media.

Reconfiguration of distribution

Distributors of digital goods are no longer constrained by geography; by transaction costs; or by the need to seek exclusive integration with suppliers. Businesses that aggregate demand (i.e. Google, Facebook, Spotify, Trip Advisor) act as intermediaries that control the relationship between third-party suppliers/content creators by integrating forward in the value chain. They aim to attract end users through network effects so that the value of the service increases as the number of users increases. This often leaves suppliers and creators dependent on algorithm-led discovery such as search and recommendation systems in order to reach end users.

Reconfiguration of consumption

What determines the creation of value has shifted away from controlling the supply of a good, or the distribution of scarce resources, to controlling demand for abundant resources – users. Companies such as Apple and Disney have been successful by a strategy placing user experience and creativity at the centre of a differentiated and fully integrated value chain.

The Transformational Components of Strategic Capabilities

In response to reconfigurations in industry value chains, the transformation of key strategic business capabilities depends on developing or re-evaluating a series of components. This section will focus on these components with specific use cases.

1.     Transformation of employee experience

Start with employees and cultural norms. Employees can be either the greatest impediment to change or leading advocates. Organisations which focus on the employee experience can establish a culture conducive to successful digital transformation. Employee experience encompasses daily activities in the workplace, a sense of purpose and value and, crucially, aligning expectations with the organisation’s goals and vision. Key to this vision is an investment in principles, processes and training which entrench:

• Self-sufficient access to domain-specific information. Particularly around real-time customer intelligence and the reduction of time-intensive insight discovery. More specifically, the advent of self-service analytics still leaves gaps with introducing bias with data selection or problems with consistent insight interpretation. What is really required is self-sufficiency with access, management and maintenance of information systems.

• A common knowledge base. Tools which consolidate and share knowledge help break organisational silos and enable groups to communicate and collaborate in real time. An example is Xero’s service design initiative to document, communicate and visualise customer and staff journeys across time zones and remote workplaces.

• Distributed responsibility. The ability to rapidly restructure operating models to better coordinate cross-functional teams, external partnerships or co-designed customer solutions. This is best exemplified by the GoodSAM app. Here, emergency calls for cardiac arrest simultaneously alert Ambulance Victoria as well as qualified first aiders in the immediate vicinity who are directed to the incident. Widening the scope of responsibility has saved lives.

• A continuous learning culture. Learning within an organisation needs to be viewed as a deliberate, formal practice. This practice can entail customised and highly targeted online courses alongside having highly proficient employees teach key skills to colleagues in small groups. Canva, which aims to democratise design, is one company to take this approach by establishing cultural norms which foster feedback and radical candor.

2.     Transformation of customer experience

A focus on building meaningful customer relationships is not new. However, the foundation of digital transformation is to gain a clearer understanding of what customers experience.

The application of digital tools, cross-disciplinary design methods and engagement strategies has accentuated customer experience with: 

• Feedback loops. Feedback between content creation and content consumption drive a great sense of intimacy between users and creators. This is evidenced by innovation in the media and content creation space with the emergence of models (many of which are direct payment) like Clubhouse, Onlyfans, Substack and Twitter’s recent announcement of Super Follow.

• Customer intelligence. A greater awareness of individual preferences or behaviours by integrating customer data across multitudes sources and silos into a data platform to provide a ‘360-degree view of the customer’. For instance, the food retail chain Chipotle created a unified view of over 2,400 restaurant operations to increase customer loyalty by 30%.

• User participation and co-creation. Human-centred design tools can be used to enable customers to participate in an organisation’s value chain. This spans collaborative content co-creation (i.e. platforms which source early-stage concepts from consumers to create prototypes such as the clothing company Betabrand); to near real-time insights about new products or services (i.e. Remesh engages with customers via live video diaries and then uses AI to organise responses); or direct advocacy where consumers become the brand media.

• Transparent data and AI ethics. Personal privacy and information transparency can become a business feature through an ethical consideration of data collection and algorithmic decision making. In terms of transparency (or simply getting in front of AI regulation), companies need to consider launching AI registers that explain how they use algorithms as part of their product services. The City of Amsterdam’s automated parking control register is an excellent reference point with concise details about the information used by the system, the operating logic, and its governance.

Of course, when it comes to understanding the customer experience, don’t become too data and algorithm dependent – get out and talk to real people.

3.     Transformation of operations

Advances in robotics, sensors, IoT and AI are now offering to transform operations outside of supply chains or back office processes. The key components to turning efficiency gains into profit drivers and cost optimisation are:

• Linking and combining cross-functional data. Is the first step to transforming supply chain management through the integration of data streams from internal sources with external supply networks in a data hub. The power of data is compounded when new data, such as streamed operational data from sensor devices, is attached to data which has already been modelled – typically from finance or sales – to better understand, for instance, the real-time cost of downtime for a given manufacturing process.

• Demand forecasting with machine learning. Estimating demand serves as the starting point for warehousing, shipping, price forecasting, supply planning and the anticipated needs of customers. Machine learning improves on traditional forecasting methods where there are volatile demand patterns, rapidly changing environments or new product launches. Adding complex variables to financial or sales reports such as social media signals; click streams; geo-location devices; IoT; natural language transcriptions etc is an additional benefit.

• Decision intelligence and modelling alternative scenario simulations. The ability to model ‘what if’ scenarios can be addressed with ‘digital twins’ – digital replicas that help test, model and predict the impact of various choices on our future. Singapore has embraced digital twins for urban planning and identifying the impact of environmental change.

• Providing secure and governed access to a shared information ecosystem. Blockchain technology offers a new architecture of trust based on decentralised control; a shared view of the truth; and the direct exchange of value through tokens. The FMCG industry, specifically major grocery distributors, have trialled blockchain to track food throughout the supply chain, gathering real-time data to spot inefficiencies and create trustworthy audit trails. Unilever are testing blockchain for media buying and the reconciliation of data among advertisers, agencies and publishers.

4.     Transformation of business models

Business models are essentially stories that explain how organisations work and provide insight into how to deliver value to customers at a particular cost. Digital transformation clears the stage for new stories and their relationship with strategy. It also encourages companies to experiment, learn, and place multiple bets on new models by setting up internal innovation (intrapreneurial) units. However, to be effective, these units must have influence and input with product development and sales functions.

Business model transformation greatly depends on the initial success of transforming the capabilities previously discussed. It helps to sense and respond to market, competitive and regulatory disruptions. And no new business model or technology innovation will ever transform an industry unless it can be connected to emerging or scalable market needs. Prevailing models in the digital economy include:

• Subscription services. Subscription models such as Netflix or the New York Times, as well as on-demand loaning of goods or services (SaaS providers such as AWS), can succeed through capturing significant consumer attention or being recognised for high-quality niche focus. The fact remains, of course, that content creation with differentiated value is hard.

• Digital platforms. Platforms such as Coursera and Shopify facilitate a relationship between third-party suppliers/content creators and end user. These platforms succeed by commoditising trust and increasing the economic value of everybody that uses the platform. As discussed earlier, demand aggregators fit into this pattern, but use network effects to capture the total economic value – hence the stoush between Australian media publishers and Facebook.

• Integrators. Businesses which integrate across the whole business value chain provide sustainable competitive benefits including differentiation based on design (in the case of Apple, their operating system); an easier adoption path for new products (annual generations of iPhones); and profit maximisation owing to the ability to apply premium pricing for a superior user experience.

• Data products. This entails the aggregation, augmentation and transformation of diverse data sets into information-based services. This approach typically takes two forms. Data as a service which offers direct revenue potential such as credit card transaction data used for customer behaviour and retail spend analysis. Or companies such as CoreLogic which provide subscription-based products that access rich property data. And secondly, data-enhanced products which maximise revenue by improving price or sales quantity such as cycling apps that measure movement in real-time and positioning in 3D space so as to simulate and gamify racing.
  

[1] Such as the trite and lazy analogy that ‘data is the new oil’.

LOOKING TO Leverage and utilise your data? REACH OUT.

Whiteark is not your average consulting firm, we have first-hand experience in delivering transformation programs for private equity and other organisations with a focus on people just as much as financial outcomes.

We understand that execution is the hardest part, and so we roll our sleeves up and work with you to ensure we can deliver the required outcomes for the business. Our co-founders have a combined experience of over 50 years’ working as Executives in organisations delivering outcomes for shareholders. Reach out for a no obligation conversation on how we can help you.

Article by Pete Crawford

Digital Transformation Playbook

Technology is changing at a rapid pace and while technology is changing, companies will continue to be forced to change. New technologies can disrupt established businesses, but more importantly they stimulate opportunities for innovation. In today’s environment, business owners are more concerned about missing opportunities to grow, than become obsolete.

Technology prompts companies to rethink how they do business.

Technologies including big data, the cloud, the Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence are helping entrepreneurs to develop new business models and disrupt the established way of running operations.

Digital technologies are:

• Enabling businesses to operate in new ways to deliver more value to customers and generate more productivity and cost efficiencies

• Altering competitive landscapes

• Changing the economics of markets

“CONTENTS

> Technology
> What is digital transformation?
> Guiding your digital transformation strategy
> A digital transformation approach
> Tips for successful digital transformation
> Benefits of digital transformation”

Guiding your digital transformation strategy

Digital Strategy

A clear strategy determines your organisation's ability to reimagine and transform your business for the digital world. A multi-year digital strategy focused on driving customer experience, operational efficiency, and new revenue.

The digital strategy is the foundation for operating the business and delivering on business targets. New revenue streams, customer experience, and operational efficiency will all be viewed from a digital lens.

Technology modernisation is critical to your ability to meet changing market demands.

12 benefits of digital transformation

Need support with your digital transformation? Reach out to the Whiteark team.

We’re a team of doers led by Jo Hands and James Ciuffetelli. We don’t believe in unnecessary layers; and between us we have over 50 years of collective experience, expertise and global connections. Delicately weaving these together, we engage with you directly, with a single-minded focus on the task at hand. Collaborating at a senior level to propel organisations forward, we intricately map out and execute your next move, ensuring you’re prepared, protected and prosperous. Contact us to book in an obligation free conversation today.

Digital Transformation

Digital technologies have recast business models and business value chains for over two decades, in almost every facet of work. The financial services, retail, media, entertainment and travel sectors have all been upended.

The burgeoning internet of things, along with technologies like edge commuting, materials science and even 3-D printing means that the industrial sector is likely to see the same upheavals as the commercial and services sectors have currently endured.

Those disruptions will prove uncomfortable and even destructive for some, yet the long-term benefits of digitisation are now much better understood.

“Article written by Andrew Birmingham, Editor-in-chief and Associate Publisher at Which-50.com”

In a report from Telstra called “Embracing the Digital Economy” the authors write, “Increased digitisation in Australia could add up to $90 billion to the Australian economy corresponding to 250,000 new jobs by 2025. The digital economy benefits are an Australia-wide opportunity that can have profound impacts for communities.” (https://www.telstra.com.au/business-enterprise/news-research/research/embracing-the-digital-economy)

Much more, faster

The first 25 years of disruption seem almost evolutionary compared to the huge acceleration of digital transformation since the global COVID pandemic upended the economy.

Bond Capital’s Mary Meeker — author of the famous annual “State of the Internet” report — predicted in April last year that the businesses which will weather the disruption best will be those that embrace the core tenets of digital business. They will rely on Cloud services, sell always in-demand products or products that make businesses more digitally efficient, they will be easily discoverable online and can serve customers with limited contact.  

Later in 2020 McKinsey & Company studied the impact of COVID-19 on its corporate clients and reported that most had, on average, experienced seven years of transformation in just six months. Another way to think of that is that if you didn’t reform your business during those months you are now seven years behind your competitors!

The effect was even more pronounced in the Asia Pacific region, which saw an average of ten years worth of transformational work in just six months. 

And while much of the focus was on the impact of the shift to work-from-home arrangements, the biggest impact was actually found elsewhere. The management consultants reported the largest leap in digitisation was in the share of offerings that are digital in nature — now at 55 per cent on average globally, up from only only 35 per cent before the pandemic began.

But this is not simply an issue for global enterprises. One of the extraordinary effects of the pandemic shutdown is that every community everywhere in the world was impacted at about the same time, creating a rare economic alignment requiring adjustments to businesses large and small.

According to McKinsey, the reason why every business no matter its scale or maturity has had to react is because the biggest inhibitor to digital transformation — the inertia of business as usual — was swept away. 

BAU was simply no longer a viable option. 

Take ecommerce, for instance. About ten per cent of Australia’s retail trade happened online pre-COVID, according to National Australia Bank. That ballooned in March 2020, simply because there was no alternative. 

And it immediately created new problems.

Australia’s logistics sector was calibrated around single-digit or low double-digit online sales. It simply was not equipped to cope with an overnight shift to mass online trade.

And remember, that huge shift in consumer behaviour occurred when internal borders were closing and international travel was greatly restricted. 

Customer service was likewise disrupted. Internal call centres in Australia were closed as staff were ordered home. Companies that relied on outsourced call centres overseas fared even worse in some cases. 

Luzon province in the Philippines, which hosted call centres for many Australian businesses, shut down with less than 24 hours notice — leaving businesses to contend with how they could get their staff home from the office in the middle of a strict curfew. Taking calls from customers simply wasn’t the main concern!

The impact on call centres of the massive shift to work-from-home revealed the extent to which those businesses which took digital technology seriously suddenly had a massive advantage over those that didn’t. Companies that relied on Cloud-based software-as-a-service applications were able to migrate staff rapidly to home working arrangements. 

Those who were late to the party struggled to adjust.

Measuring success

Digital transformation, like many business process reengineering projects, often suffers from the difficulty of proving the benefits. 

BCG for instance, says that as few as 30 per cent of digital transformations deliver the intended business benefits.  ( https://which-50.com/only-30-per-cent-of-digital-transformations-are-successful-bcg/ )

However, such statistics need to be taken with a grain of digital salt. These figures tend to reflect the original deliverables in the business case, and really represent a failure of planners to understand and define the long-term benefits.

McKinsey has identified five metrics leaders should focus on to determine success in digital.

These include:

The return on digital investments. Don't just look at the value of an individual project, but rather how an initiative supports your strategic organisational goal. Don’t try to fix everything at once, but focus on a critical process or a customer journey and then broaden out from there.

Percentage of annual technology budget spent on bold digital initiatives. Don’t starve your most strategic and bold initiatives with parsimonious budgets. And recognise that technology projects have changed — the days of big monolithic IT architecture is past, moving instead to best-of-breed tools, customer applications and what the technologists call micro-services (https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/microservice#:~:text=A%20microservice%20is%20a%20service,independently%20deployable%20and%20independently%20scalable).

Time to market for digital apps. Don’t boil the ocean. Instead, focus on the quick translation of ideas into tools for frontline use. Time to market for things like new analytics models or new application tools should be measured in months, not years!

Percentage of the leaders’ incentives linked to digital. Align management incentives to the organisation’s digital goals and make sure that incentives across departments do not work at cross purposes. Your technology chief needs to be involved heavily in product design and delivery and their incentives should be inked to things like new application builds, cycle time, and business value generated.

Top technical talent attracted, promoted and retained. Finally, and crucially, focus on attracting and retaining the best talent in areas such as data engineering and analytics, design and user experience, and core technology. And remember that the talent you need will change as your digital maturity improves. So the staff plan can not be a set-and-forget engagement.

Digital transformation is a super cycle that will last decades. Many companies are only part of the way in their journey.

Industry analyst Gartner, for instance, says that 87 per cent of senior business leaders say digitalisation is a company priority — yet only 40 per cent of organisations have brought digital initiatives to scale. And Gartner warns that the gap between aspiration and achievement is widening (https://www.gartner.com/en/publications/the-it-roadmap-for-digital-business-transformation).

 The changes ushered in by the COVID-inspired acceleration are likely to prove sticky, according to Gartner, and consumers will continue to reward businesses that make the experience of being a customer simpler, faster and easier. 

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Article by Andrew Birmingham

Digital Transformation. Are you ready?

You can’t afford to wait for this pandemic to be over, so what are you doing to future proof now.

People have an amazing capacity to forget. To revert to their old behaviours. And that might have been the case if COVID had come and gone quickly. But it’s not going anywhere, and we all know by now - this time it’s going to be different.

The question on everyone’s minds is not ‘when will this be over?’, it’s ‘what will the new normal look like?’

As business leaders, however, we don’t have the luxury of being able to sit on the sidelines and watch. We need to anticipate the market. Analyse data and look into the future. Of course nobody knows for sure what the ‘new normal’ will look like, but it doesn’t mean we can’t prepare nonetheless.

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

What’s apparent all around us, however, is that the already-fast digital transformation of organisations, has accelerated to a furious pace.

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B2B

In the B2B space adoption of zoom, teams, slack, trello, webex and other digital tools has gone through the roof. And in the background of all that, there are projects frantically going on to protect the security of a dispersed workforce, and to move instantly redundant legacy systems to the cloud.

B2C

In the B2C space the changes are even more obvious, and they happened immediately. If you didn’t have an effective online presence before, you’ve either been playing catch-up, or you’re already out of business. What people have been buying has changed too.

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McKinsey surveyed consumer sentiment and behaviour across 45 countries, and on 8th July published their results*. One of the consistent themes, worldwide, was a shift to more mindful shopping. In the US, for example, 31% of people surveyed are changing to less expensive products to save money, and 21% are researching the brand, and product before making a purchase.

And they’re not researching those brands standing in aisle 7 with a mask on. They’re at home, searching online and then getting their groceries delivered to the door.

And that kind of capability doesn’t just happen overnight. So the businesses that were prepared, and ready for the world to go digital have not only survived, they’ve thrived.

To gain a little insight into Australian organisations’ digital preparedness for COVID, we spoke to Rube Sayed, General Manager of a Sydney-based Managed IT Services company, Datcom Cloud.

“For some of our clients it was a seamless transition. They were already 100% in the cloud. Phone, apps, security all in place – and they just got on with it. For many, however, they had to rush through projects that would normally take a year or so, into months. We’ve had to expand our workforce by about 20% to deal with it all.”

— Jo Hands, Director Whiteark

So while you might need a crystal ball to know what’s going to happen in the future (in 2020 – who can tell) you certainly don’t need one to be prepared.

If there’s a digital transformation project you still haven’t gotten around to yet.

Don’t wait. Give me call, or reach out on LinkedIn. And I can help.

As the saying goes, you don’t just stumble across luck, it’s what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

So ask yourself, are you just ready? Or are you COVID-Ready…..

* McKinsey Ref: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/a-global-view-of-how-consumer-behavior-is-changing-amid-covid-19#