What are the most important considerations for organisations planning to accelerate their digital transformation?
To accelerate your digital transformation, you must build a solid foundation with clean data. You need to have the ability to identify what you know (about your customer), what data is required (to build up the proper customer representation) in your data stack, and how it will be consumed (to drive business outcomes and differentiation for your customers). Next, you’ll need a clear digital strategy (and experience design) to understand where you're trying to go. Without that planning and experience design perspective, knowing where or how to start or drive adoption and trust through value-based digital experiences is challenging.
How should organisations prioritise their acceleration projects?
Prioritising acceleration projects should be based on the (customer and business) outcomes you're driving for your company. You must balance technology disruption and innovation in the industry and ensure you understand what's relevant to your customers and business priorities. For example, what is critical for a digital customer experience? Is it focused on my customers and the ability to access information, to be able to purchase at the point of need, or to connect for support on my preferred channel? To prioritise these needs, you should understand your customers' demands, how they fit into your service portfolio and the differentiation levels of experience you're building and offering.
You must balance technology disruption and innovation in the industry and ensure you understand what's relevant to your customers and business priorities.
What are the most effective strategies you employ to help clients enhance consumer engagement, generate new revenue and better serve customers?
At Hewlett Packard Enterprise, we are pivoting from the standard way of selling products and services into subscription-based solutions and environments. If our customers want to grow their businesses dynamically to meet their needs, we now offer this on a subscription basis. So, rather than going through a complex and time-consuming process of cross-selling and up-selling products and services (that take time to deploy or implement), we can scale customer needs at the point of need. That's a very different way of working. As our experiences pivot towards subscription-based solutions, this will provide more flexibility and scalability to meet our customer's needs and, of course, be more effective and relevant. Of course, it also means our customers invest in solutions and experiences when needed rather than signing up for a longer-term commitment.
As our experiences pivot towards subscription-based solutions, this will provide more flexibility and scalability to meet our customer's needs and, of course, be more effective and relevant.
What do you see as the role of leadership, culture and mindset in this sort of change?
I think they all play a role, and there needs to be a lot of value and trust from the customer to drive the adoption and change the way digital engagement can take place. Any significant transformation relies on three factors. First, there's top-down executive buy-in and sponsorship – getting the support to state what we will do and how we will do it, both from an investment, customer experience, mindset, and cultural perspective. Second, you need to be policy and process-first and technology-second. Make sure you can simplify and standardise the process execution, removing divergence and disparity – and then you have a technology play that helps with the execution, automation, and provisioning of digital information. The third and final element is the key one. This is about having the right mindset to drive change because, more than anything, humans tend to resist change. Without management sponsorship and a robust change network that can drive and manage this, making sure people are aware and understand why that change is happening, you'll struggle to get the adoption. I think that's critical.
I think they all play a role, and there needs to be a lot of value and trust from the customer to drive the adoption and change the way digital engagement can take place.
ADAM JONES
Technology Strategist
Pointnext Strategy & CTO
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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