We used to call this topic automation. Now we call it digitization, digitalization or digital transformation. Anyway, it is going to save every organization millions of dollars. And the money we save we can use for other better purposes.
The picture shows an example of the digital age in which we now live, called Financial Inclusion. Meaning that where ever you are, if you have your phone with you, you can pay bills and buy goods or services with it.
Suppose that you used to had to walk for 40 miles to get your salary or to pay the rent. Now if you can get your salary online and pay your bills with your phone, you can save this time and use it for other things.
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 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 organization create a single shared digital space, it does not take away their uniqueness, it just gives more room for own culture and identity.
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 digitization.
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.
Digital Transformation, what is it?
To understand digital transformation it is best to know the definition of it: 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..
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 congestions, power fall outs, peak loads, etc.. This can be accomplished with IoT and data and doing trend analysis. In a smart organization, you want to prevent fraud or people 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.
How To Do Digital Transformation For Your Company?
It is not a best practice to just digitalize anything anywhere. That will not work, will not lead to anywhere and never will be realized, because of the world change 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.
How Does Dragon1 Support your Digital Transformation?
If you are 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 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 contains a strategy map, customer journey map, architecture blueprint and roadmap. So you will also for every theme design the corresponding visualizations.
Bring digital to live: Map your strategy and processes
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 on Dragon1 you can create design and visualizations and use templates to reach a high productivity.
An Example Enterprise Architecture for Transformation of 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 timebox 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.
A Framework for Digital Transformation
Many organizations use a framework to guide their transformation. The visualization above shows a much-used example of that.
Are you interested in Digital Transformation?
If you are interested in using Dragon1 and 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).