Fuel your business' transition into the digital age with this insightful and comprehensive resource
Digital Business Transformation: How Established Companies Sustain Competitive Advantage offers readers a framework for digital business transformation. Written by Nigel Vaz, the acclaimed CEO of Publicis Sapient, a global digital business transformation company, Digital Business Transformation delivers practical advice and approachable strategies to help businesses realize their digital potential.
Digital Business Transformation provides readers with examples of the challenges faced by global organizations and the strategies they used to overcome them. The book also includes discussions of:
- How to decide whether to defend, differentiate, or disrupt your organization to meet digital challenges
- How to deconstruct decision-making throughout all levels of your organization
- How to combine strategy, product, experience, engineering, and data to produce digital results
Perfect for anyone in a leadership position in a modern organization, particularly those who find themselves responsible for transformation-related decisions, Digital Business Transformation delivers a message that begs to be heard by everyone who hopes to help their organization meet the challenges of a changing world.
Table of Contents
Preface xvii
Section 1 Now 1
1 The Death of Business as Usual 3
It’s All Change 3
Truth, Knowledge, Vision 4
Constant Beta 9
Digital Assets and Liabilities 10
Digital Business Transformation: Why It’s More Than Just Technology 12
2 The Four Forces of Connected Change 15
Customer Behaviors 16
Technological Change 18
Business Models 23
Societal Change 26
3 What Is Slowing Down Established Businesses? Blocks, Brakes, and Behaviors 31
Top-down Decision Making 33
Organizational Silos 33
Legacy Technology 36
Short-termism 38
Talent Shortages 38
Values and Culture (and Purpose) 40
“Not Invented Here” 41
Section 2 Next 45
4 Characteristics of a Digital Business 47
The Inconvenient Truth 47
Decoding What Digital Companies Do Well 49
Decoding How They Do It 52
5 The Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) of Digital Business Transformation 57
The Two BHAGs of Digital Business Transformation 58
Goal 1: Developing the Muscle of Continuous Change (the PS How) 59
Goal 2: Building the Capability to Identify and Realize Value (SPEED) 61
6 Strategy 65
Swarm Intelligence 65
The Role of Strategy 66
Anchor Strategy on Your Customer, Not Your Competition 67
Determine “Where to Play” by Looking at Your Market Differently (the D-3 Model) 68
“How to Win”: View Your Transformation as a Portfolio of Moves 71
Build “Your” Capabilities: The Partner Ecosystem 73
Bringing Products to Market: The Elusive Product-Market Fit 75
7 Product 77
Operating in Constant Beta 77
The Relentless Hunt for Value 79
The Inconvenient Truths of Product 79
The Forces of Change in Product 81
Agile, Lean, and DevOps 82
Banking Case Study: Transforming Product 85
8 Experience 89
Everything in Your Business Contributes to Your Customer Experience 89
What Is Experience, Anyway? 90
Orienting to the Customer 93
Brand Is the Experience and Experience Is the Brand 95
Data and Computation 100
What Makes a Great Experience? LEAD (Light, Ethical, Accessible, Dataful) 104
9 Engineering 107
Technology as a Cost Center to Technology as a Value-driver 108
Spaghetti Tech: The Layers of Enterprise IT 110
Moore’s Law 110
Legacy Technology 111
The Impact of Product and Rise of Engineering 112
Technology and Engineering 114
Architecture: Cloud 115
Microservices 116
Ways of Working: Agile, Lean, DevOps 118
Engineers 119
Automation 120
It’s All About the Talent 120
10 Data 123
Data as an Asset 125
Getting Started with Data 126
Utility: How Do You Get Useful Data on the Right Audience? 128
Data Architecture: Is the Data in a Format and Structure That Are Accessible? 130
Data Science and Artificial Intelligence 131
Designing for Data: How Do You Design Your Products, Services, and Experiences to Collect Data? 133
Ethics: How Does Becoming Data-led Impact Your Ethical Responsibility? 133
11 Leading a Gryphon Organization 137
Learning to Think Differently 138
Characteristics of a Gryphon Organization 140
Section 3 How 147
12 Components of Successful Digital Business Transformations 149
1. Always Remember the Ultimate Goals of Digital Business Transformations (the DBT BHAGs) 149
2. Align the Team Around a Shared Vision 150
3. Get C-level Buy-In 151
4. Anchor in Outcomes 151
5. Seize Your Quick Wins and Communicate 152
6. Move Fast 153
7. Be Thoughtful About Your Governance Choices 154
8. Choose Partners Who Will Co-create and Are a Fit for Your Team 155
9. Keep Your Teams Small and Cross-functional 156
10. Consider New Approaches to Funding That Match the Way Projects Work 157
13 What Transformation Journeys Actually Look Like 159
They Are Never a Straight Line 159
They Require Treating Digital as More than a Channel 161
They Are Almost Always Driven by Uncertainty 163
Without a Clear Vision, Functions Get Disconnected Fast 165
The Many Paths to Transformation 166
14 The Beginning 169
Why There Is No “End” 169
Where Do We Go from Here? 170
What’s in Your Digital Moat? 173
What Are You Building? 173
Everyday Superheroes 174
Notes 177
Acknowledgments 185
Index 189
