Digital transformation requires leaders to reconsider their business models in the face of market disruptions, changing customer needs, new technology capabilities, greater security threats, and new opportunities to empower a digital workforce.
3 Digital Transformation Strategies in SMB
2020 Book Reads: Agile, Innovation, and Transformation
For the second year in a row, I share with you all the books that I read as part of my GoodReads challenge. My top books from 2019 included reads about transformation, including The Ride of a Lifetime and The Technology Fallacy, books for entrepreneurs such as Lost and Founder and Inspired, and AI books such as AI Superpowers.
This year, my reading covered several themes and represent my journey from pre-COVID, through COVID's early months, and then through my personal and StarCIO business transformation.
Here's the list:
Dashboard of 650+ Informative Articles by Isaac Sacolick
I published over 200 hundred articles over the last couple of years, have over 650 published since I started writing 15 years ago, and in the next month, I will complete my 500th post on this blog.
So in my last post on the elephant in the room, I promised to share with you a dashboard to help find my best articles on digital transformation, agile planning, product management, DevOps, ITSM, data science, data governance, dataops, customer experience, future of work, artificial intelligence, CIO / leadership, transformative change, and other topics.
Click here to access the dashboard of my articles published, where you can search by year, site, category, and post ranking. Click on any post title to access the post.
Want to know my favorite articles by category? Please complete the survey and, at its end, sign up for the Driving Digital newsletter. I'll be sharing my top articles by category, along with my latest articles.
Celebrating 100+ Posts by Revealing the Elephant in the Room
What a week and what a year. I think we're all looking forward to a quiet and peaceful holiday. I think many of us are happy and hopeful about flipping the calendar to 2021. While experts warn us about a difficult few months ahead of us, I think we're all eyeing the days when we feel safe, when we can break bread with family, enjoy a toast with friends, fly to our favorite destinations, and feel human again.
Please stay healthy and safe. Happy Holidays!
Now for this week's exciting news, and, revealing the elephant in the room on your 2021 digital transformation plans.
How to Drive Agility with Intelligent ERP in the New Normal
Driving agility has taken on greater meaning and importance because of the COVID pandemic, and successful digital leaders recognize the urgency in enabling smarter, faster, safer, and innovative organizations. Organizational agility and resilience are increasing in significance as health conditions, the economy, customer needs, and supply chains characterize the new normal.
Digital leaders know that driving agility can start with small teams experimenting and learning through proof of concepts and pilots. But to generate competitive advantages during the new normal, scaling changes to market conditions requires leveraging Intelligent ERP as a data source, integration hub, analytics engine, and workflow orchestrator.
Intelligent ERP runs in the cloud and provides organizations capabilities and tools to listen, learn, and instrument incremental operational changes.
Adjust to Evolving Customer Needs and Supply Chain Risks
Driving agility requires business leaders to reexamine their business models
and interactions with suppliers and customers. Changes are most visible in
industries like healthcare that are adjusting emergency services for COVID
patients, banking in providing new loans and other financial services to small
businesses, and brick and mortar retailers adding new purchasing and
fulfillment options.
Digital transformation is also a strategic driver for manufacturers that
must improve workers’ safety conditions while rapidly adjusting their
operations to changing customer demands, distribution opportunities, and
supply chain risks. Financial rewards for the winners can be significant, and
reports from an IDC survey
indicate that digitally transformed manufacturers and retailers have eight
times more revenue and are twice as profitable.
Investments and migrations to intelligent ERPs serve as the backbone for
business agility by connecting customer intelligence with operational
analytics. These two critical data sets and workflows enable business leaders
to spot trends and outliers, allowing them to make real-time decisions on
operations, business priorities, and customer interactions.
Democratize Decision Making with Intelligent Analytics
Driving agility during the new normal requires leaders to scale decision
making to employees on the front lines working with customers and suppliers.
Democratizing decision making empowers these subject matter experts to make
the most informed decisions that drive key performance indicators in
operations, marketing, and sales.
Picture a marketer trying to
adjust ad messaging, media buys, or content strategies as regional and local
health and economic conditions evolve. Does she have time to join virtual
meetings and gain consensus on the required changes, or does she have access
to analytics with the most relevant information?
How about an
operational manager that reviews customer demand forecasts and real-time
updates on material costs to adjust the number of employees on the factory
floor and production volumes?
In both cases, leaders have removed
themselves from operational decisions and empowered frontline workers with the
analytics to make informed decisions and tools to enable operational
adjustments. Leaders must be able to trust when, where, and how subject matter
experts make timely decisions. To develop trust and confidence, successful
digital leaders instrument feedback loops that aggregate data from operations,
sales, and markets and empower data scientists to build and maintain machine
learning models. These models are tested and then operationalized through
regular and scheduled updates. This process ensures that frontline workers
make governed decisions using the latest intelligence around the new
normal.
Drive Operational Agility with Real-Time Information and Collaboration
So what do digital leaders implement to enable this type of transformation? Here are some of the key steps:
- Replace in-person meetings and collaborations with intelligent workflows driven by low-code platforms
- Enable real-time stream data processing that flags new opportunities, shifts in demand, or material risks
- Create a culture of learning and empowerment where frontline subject matter experts have access to analytics, data visualizations, and workflows to make real-time decisions based on market conditions
- Iteratively improve machine learning models, publish KPIs, and share feedback with leaders and employees around strategies and priorities
- Automate operations where tools like RPAs and CI/CD application deployment processes improve the reliability and speed of manual processes
- Leverage intelligent ERP in the cloud for robust, reliable, and high performing employee experiences
Evolving from legacy to intelligent ERPs
in the cloud is central to this strategy, and
expert analysts have weighed in on the importance of this transition
for digital, data-driven organizations.
Jo Peterson, vice president of cloud services & security services at
Clarify360, starts with cloud and mobile experience fundamentals. She says,
“End users like the mobility and flexibility that cloud ERP brings. Cloud ERP
can foster collaboration as data is centralized, and each department has
access.”
Going one step further, Keith Townsend, principal of CTO Advisor, makes
the case why deploying the ERP to the cloud and maturing DevOps practices are
key to organizations driving agility. “Advanced analytics capabilities lead to
more complex business queries, requiring more powerful systems. System
managers must adopt disciplines from the application development team and
adopt CI/CD processes that enable ERP operations to keep pace with business
requirements.”
Taking a few steps backward, I believe most leaders would agree that organizations relying on paper processes, spreadsheet-driven analytical tools, and top-down decision making are no match for the speed, volatility, and competitiveness that defines the new normal.
What drives agility requires empowering people with update-to-date information, robust and easy-to-use tools, automations that free people’s time, and high-performance infrastructure. The intelligent ERP enables the agility, collaboration, and culture required for organizations to respond, compete, and grow during the new normal and transform to digital enterprises.
This post is brought to you by SAP.
The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent SAP's views and opinions.
AWS, Salesforce Turn Up The Volume as Digital Transformation Fuels the Cloud Wars
When considering digital transformation platforms, customer experiences, and internal workflows, CIOs and architects face a common decision on platforms and architecture. We call it the build versus buy decision, even though today there's a third hybrid option of using low-code and no-code platforms.
Last week we witnessed two behemoth cloud/SaaS technology companies play out this type of decision at a macro scale.
How to Energize Outside-In Thinking in the World of Remote Work
There are several times during the year when I recommend leaders carve out time for outside-in thinking. The goal of outside-in thinking is to develop an expansive viewpoint on markets, customers, prospects, competition, industry, and technology capabilities through an outsider's broad perspectives and progress beyond the insider's narrow angle lens driven by stakeholders, short-term financial goals, and resolving yesterday's crisis.
Leaders cannot wait for outside-in thinking opportunities to appear before them magically and the best leaders create an environment for themselves and their teams to learn, experience, think, and brainstorm from an outsider's perspective. They establish a collaborative dialog on what people are learning, what's relevant to business priorities, which new ideas should be prioritized, what assumptions should be challenged, and what changes should be implemented.
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