Why 'Big Bang' change has no place in digital transformation

Avinash Rao, Global Head, Wipro Digital

Last September, Rakuten Bank in Japan launched 'Transfer by Facebook' - the first money transfer using Facebook. The Facebook application is a little friendlier than a routine bank transfer – it comes with a communication tool allowing a message of up to 50 words to be sent with the transfer. A few weeks later, in October, French bank Groupe BPCE launched a cash transfer service via Twitter.

The bank's mobile application allows French bank account holders to transfer a limited amount of money using Twitter without revealing account or bank branch details to the recipient. Banks that have traditionally operated from behind rocksolid walls of privacy and security are, like their customers, going digital. At the same time, new non-bank entrants such as Venmo and Apple Pay, are challenging their core business. This disruption isn't happening just with banks: we are witnessing the biggest shift in customer lifestyles and business models in the history of mankind. Successful businesses will not transform themselves over night with a big bang. Their digital transformation will be a journey over time through customer journey engineering, iteration, test and learn, and agile development. And each journey will be different with continuous evolution.

Digital evolution is giving rise to remarkable new ways of organizing businesses and addressing customers. Being digital is not about technology but rather about a lifestyle. The relevance of Facebook, the simplicity of Uber, the omnipresence of Google and others have set new expectations and standards for experience in a digital age. Customers want their interactions and experiences with brands, governments and their employers to support their new digital lifestyles.

In turn, businesses are busy trying to re-imagine their products, services, operations and business models from their customers' perspective. They are now investing in creating better experiences that are aligned with the digital lifestyle of their customers. The buzz is around “Digital Transformation” – only, organizations may take months if not years to figure out what they should be doing and how they should go about it. And while they ponder over their Digital Transformation roadmap, the customer's lifestyle will have evolved even further. We've gone past just simply talking about Digital Transformation in the face of these rapidly changing customer behaviors; it's time to start getting it done.

It is therefore necessary to understand that Digital Transformation is a larger journey, unique to each business. It goes beyond enabling individual customer touch points such as websites, mobile devices and social platforms. A Digital Transformation agenda works at the intersection of the front-end customer experience and the back-end digitization of the business itself (see Figure 1: Digital Transformation Agenda).






Digital Transformation also means keeping the customer informed and empowered and changing the way you serve the customer. For many organizations it also implies replacing large hierarchical structures with structures that are more customer centric in shape, digital in form and agile in behavior.

Digital Transformation Agenda

While customers are the reason for embarking on this digital journey, enterprise IT, marketing, operations and other departments are the ones who need to make it happen. This requires change: moving from well-established and fixed processes to adaptive, iterative and agile ones.

How is a business to achieve this? How long will it take organizations to find and validate the new products or services that their customers want? We believe that this can be done rapidly – often in as little as two days. Two months or even two weeks may be too late. With the type of technology and specialist knowledge available, one can assemble everything and everyone in a room anywhere in the world, complete first hand research, come up with simple but highly creative solutions, go to market with them, build them and have customers use them in under three months.