Even more from the Digital Transformation Conference

Attending last week’s Digital Transformation Conference, we learned about data findability solutions and the balancing act between business and customer needs.

Get the tools, get the talent

First, Catherine Vama from Procode shared some thoughts on using the right tools to unlock the changes your company needs. Critically, you need to have accurate data as the baseline for any change you make. Otherwise, your insights will be incorrect and cause delays.

Delays are bad for morale, and reduced morale causes a reactionary push for results. The issue is that that push usually leads to the project being scrapped: a need for decisiveness, an action-vacuum and little understanding of what problem the change sought to solve.

If the project does scrape through, comparing the impact of the change is difficult, and improvement hard to prove.

Catherine also recommended sorting your organization’s needs into three: what’s vital to change? What’s important to change? And finally, what would be nice to change? This isn’t critical to implementing changes, but with it things, might go more smoothly as it gives you a kind of Maslovian understanding of importance and urgency.

The question you should be asking yourself throughout the process is whether the software you’ve chosen is suitable. Perhaps the solution you’ve gone for offers 24-hour service. That’s all well and good, but if no one in your company is working nights, it’s a useless feature.

Finally, reiterating a key message from the day, Catherine said communication was key. Catherine’s tip was to go for three different modes of communicating that a change is happening, and why. This could be through conversation, email, messenger, noticeboard, Slack, HR portal, or any other system through which your company spreads messages, down to and including the company conch.

Be open to feedback, and vocal about cases when employee feedback shifts implementation.

Connect with Catherine Vama on LinkedIn.

Competing needs

When it comes to digital strategy, choosing how to divide goals between customer needs and the needs of your business can be tricky. Sarah Ilieva, digital strategist for Kew Gardens, shared how she navigates transformation.

Digital strategy allows you to pinpoint where technology can be leveraged or solve an issue. It’s grounded in organizational aims, so a good understanding of your business outcomes is important. Then, ask: who are your customers? What do they need?

Of course, the answers need to be balanced with each other, but luckily, says Sarah, business needs and customer needs are very unlikely to be diametrically opposed. In fact, as they lie parallel, it’s the space between them where digital is the solution.

Establishing a customer’s need, comparing it with the business’ need (universally this can be assumed to be ‘turning a profit’) and already-occurring customer behaviour, enables you to establish a digital strategy.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that! For more, connect with Sarah Ilieva on LinkedIn.

Dude, where’s my data?

Finally, Nick Scholz of Sinequa spoke to the importance of data findability. The vast amounts of data available means that time wastage is immense. Some statistics from Nick:

• Large organizations have an average of 367 apps.
• The average worker uses 6-8 different tools to manage their work every day.
• 50% of employees are confused about where information is stored.
• 68% of organizations plan to keep a hybrid work model for the foreseeable future.
• Employees spend an average of 1.8 hours a day searching for the data they need.

We have to be informed to transform, so radical change must be made to the way that data is managed, said Nick.

The Digital Transformation Conference was hosted by Chris Towers, the founder of Roar Media. If you feel you’ve missed out this time around, tickets for the autumn edition, also held in London, are out now.