Digital Transformation

Why Do Large Companies Do Digital Transformation?

If almost all large organizations that have run fine for years and years also start to do digital transformation, it must be very important.

One of the reasons they do it, is because more and more new business startups, using new technologies, can outrun and outsmart old large companies. Think of all the smart self-service processes (like online ordering) that are offered by small companies, that speed up a lot of work.

With new solutions like artificial intelligence (AI) you can provide services, like fraud detection, that are not possible without AI. So in order to survive, these large companies do digital transformation, or digitization, digitalization or automation.

If you look around, so probably see yourself many things still are duplicated and replicated, slowing down processes or introducing mistakes. In many countries, for instance, it occurs that in payment processes, data is often copied three or four times. Still, most invoices are not sent digitally in XBRL format.

In many hospitals, you still see temperature measurements with thermometers being written down manually and entered next in a computer. Then later this data is printed for use by other people. This can introduce a lot of capital errors.

No More Duplication of Work or Replication of Data

Today's information technology solutions make it unnecessary to duplicate work and replicate data that can be shared or centralized. Instead of working in silos, we can all work together, sharing and using consistent data from single sources of truth.

For instance, countries that are together in a single market, like the EU or Caricom, can reuse or share one single border management system and one single digital payment solution. Also, organizations that are together within one enterprise group, can reuse or share one sales system, one reused list of clients or one payroll system, one reused list of employees.

The keywords here are (cyber) security, standardization, open interfaces, protocols and services. In all processes and in all applications, certain company standards must be used or must be migrated towards. And still, this leaves room to be unique with your culture and identity in a group.

As an example: on the internet, there is one communication protocol: IP6. Every website in the world is built with HTML. Still, every website is different. You see: standardization makes things easier and cheap but does not take away your uniqueness. If a group of countries or groups of organizations create a single shared digital space, it does not take away their uniqueness, it just gives more room for their own culture and identity.

Digital Transformation definition, what is it?

To understand digital transformation it is best to know the definition:

• Digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to create new — or modify existing — business processes, culture and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. This reimagining of business in the digital age is digital transformation.

Many organizations use a framework to guide their transformation. The visualization above shows a much-used example of that.

Smart Cities and Smart Organizations

More and more cities and organizations will become smart in the near future, by means of digital transformation. A city or organization is only smart when it makes use of IoT (measuring devices) and the collected data to plan things better.

In a smart city you want to prevent congestion, power fall-out, peak loads, etc. This can be accomplished with IoT and data and by doing trend analysis. In a smart organization, you want to prevent fraud or people from leaking secrets. This can be accomplished with AI.

The challenge now is how to implement IoT and AI in your city or company? The answer is: using Enterprise Architecture, Concepts, Principles and Standards.

A Best Practice

It is not a best practice to just digitalize anything anywhere. That will not work, will not lead anywhere and never will be realized because the world changes faster than you can work.

It is a best practice to create a plan and only does what is important now to do. And in that plan, you look at the most important goals and objectives and you design a future-proof IT Infrastructure or cloud and next step by step build that IT Infrastructure or cloud in an iterative modular way, agile if you like. Redesign your processes and migrate your applications to the cloud.

If you are a country or an organization, Dragon1 supports the organizational transformation in a visual way.

It comes to breaking down your organization in several themes (often your processes, products or services) and per theme design a Dragon1 Atlas. A Dragon1 Atlas or Design Book is a set of visualizations that show the strategy, architecture and transformation of a theme. For instance, the production process, the customer services or even the business product line.

Almost every Dragon1 Atlas or Design Book contains a strategy map, customer journey map, architecture blueprint and roadmap. So you will also for every theme design the corresponding visualizations.

In order to be able to do organizational transformation you need to know what you want to strive for and in which direction you want to be heading. Next, you need to know (to analyze) the current state of the country or organization and you need to know (to design) the desired future state. And next, you need to define transformation scenarios.

For all these things, you can create designs and visualizations and use templates to reach high productivity.

An Example Enterprise Architecture Debt Reporting and Calculation

• Step 1: PRIORITIZE - Pick a theme, fi: a citizen looking his up or her debts in a single debts assistance view, showing all the outstanding debts and calculating the debts.
• Step 2: STRATEGY MAP + PROGRAM OF REQUIREMENTS - Define the goals objectives, like reducing errors, improving accuracy, including all parties. And create a program of requirements from key stakeholders (including budget per requirement)
• Step 3: CURRENT STATE ARCHITECTURE BLUEPRINT - Analyze and visualize the current state of the various scattered solutions that manually and automated take care of this. (This can be a real iceberg with many hidden dependencies and interrelationships).
• Step 4: FUTURE STATE ARCHITECTURE BLUEPRINT - Design and visualize the future state where much more activities are automated, and activities are deduplicated, data is dereplicated and many open standards for interfacing are used.
  Make sure that the design contains concepts, principles and standards that have proven results. For instance, an open standard that is more and more used with proven is JSON API
• Step 5: ROADMAP - Create a roadmap that shows when what is changed, what the impact of the change is and how the impact is handled.
• Step 6: PLAN - Plan the various changes in projects and time-box them really well.
• Step 7: EXECUTE - Carry out the changes, and in case of issues circle back to the previous step to redo them.
• Step 8: FINISH - Stop the changes, communicate the changes and educate people well.

Are you interested in using Dragon1?

If you are interested and want to discuss your case with us, you can contact us anytime by sending an email to info@dragon1.com or call +31 317 411 341 (in the Netherlands).