Summary: "The Essential Components of Digital Transformation"

When an organization undertakes a Digital Transformation journey, it’s clear success is tied to recognizing the symbiosis of “digital” and “transformation.” Tomoas Chamorro-Premuzic’s recent Harvard Business Review article “The Essential Components of Digital Transformation” illuminates this synergy. Data-driven insights, “datafying human behavior” is foundational to learning; but people need to take action to transform how they meet, exceed, and scale with the needs of their valuable customers.

In short, Chamorro-Premuzic emphasized that the critical part of digital transformation is not “digital” but “transformation.” Making investments in the latest and greatest shiny new technology company/tool has often not yielded clear benefits or ROI. The right processes, culture, and talent need to be in place to take advantage of it. Chamorro-Premuzic outlined five essential components to execute an organization’s digital transformation:

1. People - Those in the organization and those who they interact with make up the people aspect of transformation. These relationships have traditionally yielded poor or dispersed records. It’s challenging when an organization becomes too large or complex to know your customers or employees on a personal basis.

2. Data - Technology can have the biggest impact on capturing data (digital records) of people (e.g., what they do, who they are, what they prefer, etc.). This is “digitization,” or the process of “datafying human behavior.”

3. Insights - Giving meaning to the data helps to build a story of what may be going on (e.g. patient journey). Having an interpretation, we can test (run experiments) on the model through a prediction. “The point here is not to be right, but to find better ways of being wrong.”

4. Action - “The most interesting, captivating, and curious insights will go to waste without a solid plan to turn them into actions. Even with the best AI, data science, and analytics, it is up to us humans to work out what to do with a prediction.” Action will require people with the relevant skills and training, processes, and change management to unlock the key value of digital transformation.

5. Results - This is not the final stage of the digital transformation process but rather the step where you evaluate the outcome (result and/or impact) and that outcome becomes a part of a “new, richer dataset, which will be augmented and improved with the findings of the process.” This iterative process enables insights to become “more predictive, more meaningful, and more valuable, which itself gives more value to the data.”

Read more about the essential components of digital transformation.