By Brad Barton, VCI Senior Consultant
There’s a lot of discussion and noise about digital transformation lately. All of it naturally raising some important questions for a CEO, such as:
- What are the trends and threats that are going to impact my business, and how can digital be used as a lever to respond to these trends?
- What aspects of my business need to be digitized?
- How do I get started, and how should we organize ourselves around potentially disrupting ourselves?
VCI consultants have many years of experience assisting companies through digital transformations. We’ve found a natural pathway to help facilitate and direct the early discussions and beyond. We often start with a scenario-based analysis to get executives thinking in a new way about their industry, geography, and the megatrends that may be impacting them. Once we have a good sense of the megatrends and high-level actions, we design a digital roadmap. With the roadmap in place, we then help clients organize the execution and roll-out of the transformation.
Why Scenario Planning…?
Scenario Planning directly contributes to both visioning and strategic planning by providing a broader view of the world now and into the future. Scenarios tend to include a much wider horizon for our understanding of the future and consequently, expands our wisdom in making informed decisions.
We use emerging global forces and trends to create our scenarios and we make sure they are logical and compelling. We then develop a series of economic models to explain the various scenarios in numerical form to enable management to create strategic options. The options are validated both in terms of a scenario fit as well as in real options valuations. These validated options are a solid foundation for the company to then devise real strategies.
Scenario Planning Topics include:
- Global Forces – An analysis of the broad trends and events shaping the world and the opportunities they bring
- Core Competencies – Identifying the elements that the market will highly value, now and in the future
- Strategic Options – Articulating the leverage points that can potentially give you higher returns on your efforts
Digital Roadmap
Once clarity is achieved on the strategic direction of the company, we help translate this into a Digital Roadmap. This is an in-depth exercise that will necessarily involve more members of the management team, including the technology leadership team. VCI offers a digital intensity assessment to help clarify the status quo, identify gaps for improvement, and to guide the discussion going forward.
The Digital Roadmap is not a detailed project plan, rather a direction setting exercise. The details will be driven based on the needs and opportunities of the particular company, but topics may include:
- Evaluation of your current technology architecture and what improvements will be needed to support the overall transformation.
- Automation and digitization opportunities within your core operational processes. Is there an opportunity to fundamentally change the way people work together to make the process more efficient?
- Operations or collaboration centers, deciding on the level of decision-making authority a centralized operations center should employ, and exploring archetypes to decide how best to approach this topic given the culture and current state of the organization.
- Functional automation and integration opportunities, including robotic process automation and AI opportunities to improve functional processes such as finance, marketing and HR.
- Opportunities to further integrate your value stream from end to end.
Digital Transformation Planning
Armed with both the strategic insights and a high-level digital roadmap, planning can begin on the transformation. To be carried out successfully, digital transformation needs to be more than just a project handed off to the IT team. Based on the outputs above, VCI Consultants will help you navigate the following:
- Are there some projects that can just be pushed through the normal capital approval process and executed as business as usual?
- Is a new organizational unit going to be necessary to carry out the broader transformation, and if so how should it be organized and led?
- What are the cultural levers that must be considered in embarking on a transformation, and how should these be approached most effectively?
It is indeed an exciting time with so much opportunity to disrupt and expand the capabilities of new and emerging tools. VCI Consultants are available now to discuss the next steps for your firm’s Digital Transformation.
For more information or to schedule a complimentary initial consultation, contact gideon.malherbe@govci.com +1 914-381-0000
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