Digital liberation ebook

All elements of digital transformation hold their individual meaning and purpose, but combined, they enable you to understand and respond to the meaning of your customers, while giving meaning to you, your organization and society itself. Where you should put your effort first, and what’s meaningful for you, depends on your strategic goal, your organization, your citizens, your customers, your market, and your understanding of all their interrelations.

TABLE OF CONTENT

WELCOME TO THE BEST-KNOWN SECRET

THE IMAGE OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

How do you communicate digital transformation?

The colour of digital transformation

Digital transformation as an entity

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION – POINT OF DEPARTURE

Customer experience transformation

Operation model transformation

Business model transformation

Align with strategic goals

TRANSFORM YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE – ENGAGEMENT

Transforming your customer experience

Reactive to event triggered engagements

Build the right communication universe

Personalized communication

TRANSFORM YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE – UNDERSTANDING

Predict your customers’ need

Don’t sell to the digital citizen

TRANSFORM YOUR OPERATING MODEL – RELATION

Coupling system thinking with the agile mindset

The habitat of the agile mind-set

The agile mind-set and self-realization

The agile mind-set as innovator and enabler

The importance of meaningful architecture

TRANSFORM YOUR OPERATING MODEL – SENSE

The democratic organization and agile

Connecting the digital citizens

Agile boards, Collaboration & management

Agile portfolio management

DevOps – The rebellion against the status quo

The required culture for DevOps

TRANSFORM YOU BUSINESS MODEL – EMPATHY

The demystifying of empathy

Technics of empathy

The picture of definition

Empathy mapping

TRANSFORM YOUR BUSINESS MODEL – DESIGN

Problem solving ideas

The representation of ideas - Prototyping

The validation of ideas

An end-to-end approach

THE AUTHOR

WELCOME TO THE BEST-KNOWN SECRET

Let’s demystify the phenomena known as digital transformation. Let’s break down this best-known secret to success and build it up page by page. Let’s look at all the threads that connect and create this digital spiderweb. And let’s dig into what kind of role you can play as a digital artist in this new and infinite digital renaissance.

This book is born from the urge to help guide you through the digital pitfalls, to show how the anthropological approach needs to play an even bigger role now than ever, how culture, leadership, infrastructure, organizational change and agile methodologies can help if seen as intervened enablers. This book will thus not dig into deep descriptions of known technologies or methodologies. This already exists in abundance on the world wide web. The point of interest for this book is the bigger picture, the connections, the intent, the purpose and you.

I will come with this bold statement: that you will never succeed with your digital transformation if you don’t first understand the different entities in it and their connections, and then decide how your digital transformation should be.

This book will provide insights into this and show you how it all can be connected to create the great customer experience you and your customers want.

THE IMAGE OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Digital transformation, this phenomenon, what does it mean for you, give it a minute, did you arrive at a clear answer?

Now think about why the whole concept of digital transformation is so difficult to understand, why your answer is different than mine, and why your organization’s digital transformation has to be unique? Now we are ready to embark on our digital transformation journey.

How do you communicate digital transformation?

The Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein said that language and words enable us to make pictures of facts and convey these images to our peers. With digital transformation, we take the role as a young renaissance artist, as a young Da Vinci, and we start to paint this new and unrealized world. We use all the facts and experiences that we have gained through life. We combine them with visions for the future, and we add our knowledge about our peers. Now we can communicate about digital transformation, or can we?

When we communicate, we create so-called word games, we create a context in which we paint the image we want to convey to our peers. The challenge is that the perceived context of the peers might be different than yours, as they speak a different language. This often leads to what we could call an image recognition error between you and the receiver of your message. This error occurs because we don’t stick to facts, but often talk about things that can be easily misinterpreted, and then a wrong picture is drawn.

With this in mind, let’s look at the colour of digital transformation.

The colour of digital transformation

Imagine that the meaning of a message is so coloured by the context the sentence is created in, and the intent that the message is made with, that we have to play a guessing game in order to understand the intent before we can understand the message. The better we are at playing these word games, the better we are at communicating.

Wittgenstein stated that if a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand it. The same applies to organizations that fail to understand customer needs, or organizations that fail to understand themselves, or even fail to define themselves. The corporate language, context and communication channels in an organization need to be aligned with the organizational intent. This is a prerequisite for succeeding with internal and external communication. Visions of agility and experience cultures will never be realized, if there isn’t a seamless and aligned organizational language.

It also means that in order to achieve great customer experience, through digital transformation, you need to understand your organization and your customers’ diversity.

You need to understand your customers’ languages, the meaning of their word games, and their desires. You need to communicate in your customers’ diverse world of word games, or else your message will not be understood, and possibly disregarded as nonsense.

In other words, the purpose of your customer experience journey is not just to get customers into your universe. It is to understand your customers and their diverse languages, to translate and predict their ever-changing needs, to use this information to provide a deeply personal channel, and then respond to and fulfill their needs through your products.

How you want to respond to your customers’ needs should be the deciding factor for how you approach your digital transformation.

New technologies and new ways of working can help you, but always remember that they are just a means to the realization of your strategic goal. A strategic goal that is closely related to what your customers want, what you want to deliver and how you want to deliver it.

Digital transformation as an entity

Now let’s see digital transformation as an entity with its own language. An entity that speaks to your organization, which also has its own language. What is the picture that digital transformation tries to paint, what material and immaterial things make up this picture. Which parts are universal for all and which parts will due to each organizations’ own language need to be experienced and lead differently.

Let’s start small and create the basic figures in the picture. Let’s start to create a word game that can be communicated and understood. Later we will touch upon the aspects that, in regard to Wittgenstein, is nonsense to talk about. Nonsense, as they will never create a universal fact, but nevertheless, we need to understand their influence on your organization so that we can create a path for digital transformation.

We will start that journey in the next chapter.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION – POINT OF DEPARTURE

We all have a different point of departure for digital transformation. We all want to achieve unique competitive advantages. We all have our own language, context and intent when we communicate about digital transformation. This can only lead to challenges when we start to collaborate.