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© 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved.
1
5 Steps to Effectively Handle Digital Transformation and
Business Disruption: A Framework for Digitalization
Digital technology continues to change the business world dramatically. This article provides
business and IT leaders’ helpful tools to drive and manage digital transformation effectively.
The Why:
“Digital is the main reason just over half the companies on the Fortune 500 have disappeared since
the year 2000”1
– Pierre Nanterme, Chairman, and CEO of Accenture.
“Companies must be open to radical reinvention to find new, significant, and sustainable sources of
revenue”2
– McKinsey, a global management consulting firm.
The How:
As a strategic part of the everyday business, the role of the IT team is shifting from the “keep the
lights on” era to the “use of digital technologies to win” era. The benefits of digital technology are
best understood in the context of one’s organization.
Digitalization should not be considered as just another shiny IT project because it impacts the entire
enterprise. It is a crucial tool enabling growth strategy for most businesses. This document aims to
offer a “4+1 digital transformation” approach which brings together thought leaders, execution teams,
SME’s, customers, and partners to help collectively outperform the organization’s status quo.
In this paper, we propose a simple, yet effective framework for leaders to conceptualize both the
process and possible IT tools within The Medha Framework™, consisting of 4 + 1 steps to digital
transformation. This will assist the companies to increase revenue, provide better customer service,
create maximum impact, improve speed to market for new products, and boost ROI.
The Medha™ TechVelocityPartner.com’s approach also supports the “+1 “step of creating a being
culture of innovation and communication. Digital transformation should be considered both from the
employee and partner facing (inward) and from the customer-facing dimension (outward.)
© 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved.
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Medha Framework ™ Approach to Digital Transformation
Step 1. Defining the Strategy
The first step in the digital transformation effort is establishing a digital transformation strategy. This
should be in sync with the company’s business strategy, as well as, with the 5-year strategic plan. It
should identify and focus on short-term and long-term wins that can impact the business positively.
This should be looked as an agile version of business planning with various moving parts. The
following key objectives for digitalization are typically valid for most organizations.
o Program enhancement: Establish business programs that have a direct impact on business
functioning directly or indirectly. Describe each program or action concerning “desirability,”
“feasibility” and “viability.”
o Financial implications: Obtain a high-level understanding of the cost and investment
implications as well as potential return on each program/action.
To bring structure to the strategy and to achieve the objectives mentioned above, the following
guidelines are recommended:
A. Form a Digital Transformation Management Commitment Team: Choose executives
from various functions with forward-looking mindsets who will become the key decision
makers or influencers for the entire program.
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B. Potential Impact: Invest in conference visits or in-house sessions by experts to help the
digital transformation commitment team see the possible effects and returns of digital
implementations. It’s essential that the team considers the digital transformation as a game
changer and not merely another company initiative to increase revenue. Profitability is
ultimately important but focusing on the numbers alone too soon will destroy the creativity of
strategic visioning that is key to digital transformation.
C. Make Customers, Vendors and Partners’ part of the Transformation Journey: Visit the
customers, vendors, and partners to understand what they think of the service and products
offered currently. Identify trusted confidants who can give genuine feedback on the plan and
as well as with whom the transformation journey can be shared.
D. Key Players: Identify and include various individuals in the organization who need to play an
active role during this journey.
Identify Core Concerns: Identify concerns, problems as well as opportunities across the
organization. They become the foundation for transformation. Here are some issues, few customers
most frequently-cited:
o Provide Omnichannel experiences: Improve customer experience with an eye to
improving retention rates and lowering customer turnover by providing consistent
omnichannel experiences and seamless customer experience by making decisions
based on data, context and sharing customer information updates across all engagement
channels.
o Increase Brand Loyalty: Provide real-time customer information to the service agents
across all channels to avoid asking the same questions. This, in turn, may pave the way
for first-time visitors become customers and then deep-rooted loyalty to the brand.
o Attract Employees and Partners: Attract partners, employees, and suppliers by
improving engagement and maintaining consistency across channels.
o Increase Responsiveness: Provide faster response to customers, partners, and
employees.
o Manage Threats to the Business: Emerging startups with threatening business models.
o Capture Global Opportunities: Expanding to new geographies and vertical markets.
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o Exploit New Sales Channel Opportunities: Potential to leverage new business
channels or move to new verticals.
o Increase New Customer Acquisition: The single most significant source of growth.
Talking to the customers, partners, employees and creating forums with cross-functional
teams, etc. are few ways of increasing new customer acquisition.
F. IT Modernization: In most cases, digital transformation is built on top of the existing
enterprise IT. Hence, it is essential to consider IT modernization itself as an activity. To ensure the
IT team is empowered enough for the transformation journey analyzing the following eight
components is recommended:
 Customer experience platforms
 Enterprise integration strategy
 Data and analytics strategy
 Infrastructure management and cloud enablement
 Enterprise security and cybersecurity
 Release management and implementation program
 IT response time
 Enterprise IT architecture
A gap analysis of the above points will help the digital transformation commitment team understand
the scope and investments required to support the journey.
G. Cross-pollination: Include team members from other functions and “outside of the industry”
specialists in brainstorming sessions to analyze the “gap analysis” and see how they approached
digitalization journey, and the lessons learned. In some cases, real change and maximum benefits
from transformation may be achieved by looking and comparing problem and solutions from other
industries. Bring in experts who worked in multiple domains and across different sectors. To solve
long-standing problems, do not approach the solution just from one’s industry.
Step1 Outcome: To be successful, digital transformation leaders must first understand,
communicate and agree with CxO’s on the expected outcomes of the initiatives. Metrics for
business programs and actions must be identified, as well as discussing the risks and probabilities
of success for each program and activity.
© 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved.
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Case study: Below is a feasibility study created for a B2B e-commerce/marketing company whose
leadership wanted to pursue technology as a competitive advantage that shows how these
principles work in practice. Here is an example feasibility study report for the initial phase of
digitalizing the processes and operations in a high growth B2B e-commerce company in 2017:
Project Increasing responsiveness for suppliers and distributors
Problem / Opportunity
Statement
Supply chain management (SCM) process: Entire SCM process requires an
exchange of various documents such as PR, PO, Invoices, QC documents,
etc. This entire process is manual and slows down the supply and distribution
cycles, and plenty of room for human errors when data is entered is manually
Desirability Highly desirable for following reasons:
 Opportunity to reduce human errors, which is 12% of the total time
 A chance to reduce processing times by 50%
 Helps in increasing onboarding of suppliers and distributors by 90%
monthly can aid to scale the business rapidly
Feasibility
 Technology feasibility: Digital process automation solutions and
integration technologies are available and mature enough to implement the
solution(s)
Viability
 Cost viability: There are established tools in the market such as Dell
Boomi (iPaas) and OCR technologies (Kofax) which could be tested on a
subscription basis (try before you buy.) Amount invested vs. the ROI is around
56 % in two years
 Skills viability: Very active system integration partner ecosystem with
strong credentials
In addition to the business cases, key professionals who will lead the digital transformation journey,
gap analysis for IT modernization, as well as an estimate of investments required, should be
identified.
Step 2. Design and Planning
The “Bimodal IT Approach” by Gartner states, “Providers that fail to co-innovate with their customers
will not realize the full potential of digital business.” 3
© 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved.
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To establish programs, design and implementation details are needed. One of the best ways to
develop these details is to adopt the following three-stage approach concerning each business case:
 Design Thinking Sessions: To arrive at solutions to the identified program.
 Proof-Of-Value (PoV): To confirm that the identified solution does solve the program’s
business issue.
 Formulating the IT Project plan: Based on the solution identified and learnings from
PoV conducted, develop a project plan and get ready for implementation.
Design Thinking Sessions: Use of design thinking workshops, hackathons, and appropriate means
the team must generate ideas to address business cases; i.e., create PoV to validate concepts
quickly and cost-effectively. Gartner further suggests, “Mode 2 of Nonlinear IT is used where there
is a need to be exploratory in the pursuit of new business designs, processes and models, and there
is a prioritization of speed over reliability.” 4
This approach reduces risk and increases the chance of
ultimate success of projects or initiatives.
To realize better results from “Mode 2”, a review of current literature on the subject combined with
the experiences of the author, endorses an approach utilizing agile philosophy to take stock of the
gathered insights to create maximum impact, increased speed of implementation and overall
enhanced ROI. The winning companies are those that are “being agile” within an agile culture vs.
just implementing or “doing agile.”
Sometimes the best ideas/solutions come from employees, because they may understand the
problems better. Companies may get the best results when internal experts work in collaboration
with external digital transformation experts. Whoever is engaged in design thinking, they should not
lose focus on the problems users (customers) are experiencing during the entire journey. Best results
of design thinking come when issues can be identified before users notice them and possible
solutions are brainstormed during the design thinking process.
Design thinking itself can be broken down into a five-step framework for out of box thinking, utilizing
brainstorming, prioritization and thinking without boundaries.
1. Empathize: To find an appropriate solution, first, one must understand the problem from the
user perspective and empathize.
© 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved.
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2. Define: Stephen Covey’s “Begin with the end in mind” philosophy applies literally to design
thinking. Start with end-state and work backward. Design the future state of each process
without regard to current constraint, e.g., shorten process turnaround time from days to
hours. Reflect on the problem and define the problem and a plan.
3. Ideate: The team imagines innovative solutions. Work with the graphics designer to draw
pictures of the issue, and various solutions discussed in the previous stages and repeat the
process. Have the internal experts collaborate with external digital transformation experts
who can solve more significant problems with a collaborative mindset. Internal experts know
the domain, product, employees, and customers. Provide them with training and tools. Find
passionate, qualified consultants who can teach internal leaders and experts to conduct this
work on their own.
4. Prototyping: Most often companies and teams make a mistake, spending a lot of resources
by moving directly to an expensive and time-consuming prototyping stage. Preferably this
should be a genuine pretotyping effort to get to the next logical step in the prototyping
process. The solution should be brought to life in incremental steps. Exhausting resources
during this stage cannot help to deliver the best solutions to the end user. Always get
feedback from the end-users and continue to fine tune as the project moves forward.
 Slice the prototyping process into smaller portions. Test the service/product with real
users for usability/acceptance of the same before investing substantial resources.
 Use pretotyping techniques, gather feedback early, and process the outcomes
scientifically. If it makes sense from the customer point of view, move forward with the
idea/product or scrap it and move on to the next.
 Look into creative ways of pretotyping - incrementally and empirically.
5. Testing: During this stage repeat the process multiple times to identify weaknesses and
opportunities to improve the process or implementation.
“Design thinking, innovation, and ‘out of the box thinking’ do not come from ‘blinding insights’ or from
episodic training programs. They come from a culture of open communication of ideas, and from
approaching problems and solutions from different perspectives over time.” 5
© 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved.
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Step 2 Pre-outcome: By this time of the Design and Planning stage, a concrete solution to the
business case is identified. It is possible that multiple programs might get grouped into one overall
business project with a solution proposed within the project plan.
Proof-Of-Value (PoV): The business case and the identified solution(s) in the above step must be
validated and ascertained by clearly defining the PoV.
Depending on the circumstances more than one can be used. Appropriate approach will depend on
the nature of the program and the problem it is solving. Some approaches are highlighted below:
1. Hackathon: Helps in building prototypes in a short period. A valuable approach when
the solution is dependent on cutting-edge technologies, and there are concerns
regarding the feasibility of the technology.
2. Minimum Viable Product (MVP): This might be valuable if the solution or problem being
addressed pertains to the customer behavior. Therefore, building an MVP, which can be
tested with actual users for accurate feedback, is the best way to validate the solution.
3. Surveys: A cost-effective approach. This approach gets clear user feedback. It can be
a very successful method if the target segment is either internal employees or partners.
Step 2 Outcome: Based on the PoV and cost–benefit analysis, the digital transformation
commitment team is now able to decide whether it’s worth pursuing the project. Hence one should
expect some programs are dropped, and others endorsed strongly.
Formulating the IT Project plan: By now it should be clear which projects need to be pursued.
It is vital that the digital transformation commitment team start planning for its execution, budgeting,
and team creation. At this point, a formal project plan should be written and agreed upon by all
stakeholders. Apart from the solutions identified through the design thinking sessions, it is
recommended that the IT modernization projects also need to be a part of the project plan.
Step 3. Implementation
By now the digital transformation commitment team should have a clear idea of what IT
projects / products need to be delivered. Based on inputs from the previous stages, work on
specifications and expectations so that the IT team can successfully fulfill the requirements for
transformation. The following approach toward each of the identified IT project is recommended.
© 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved.
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A. Establish a Global IT Steering Commitment / Governance team: Establish a Global IT
steering commitment/governance team that can prioritize, estimate and approve projects.
The commitment team is comprised of an Enterprise architecture team, Functional SME’s
and Business stakeholders.
o Enterprise architecture team: Owns the Enterprise IT architecture, platform
adoption and technology direction to all IT projects. Also gives estimates for the
projects identified.
o Functional SME: Owns the definition and direction of the IT project from the
business point of view.
o Business stakeholders: Govern the ROI aspects of each project, hence control the
budget and other financial support for the success of IT projects.
B. Establish the Project Specific Governance Model: Four key teams are essential for the
success of the entire project portfolio.
o Architecture team: Owns the project-specific IT architecture. They report to the
enterprise architecture Team.
o Engineering team: Owns the delivery of the IT project. Often headed by a project
manager and consists of developers and testers.
o Product owner: Owns the functional success of the IT project. Often dictates the
functional requirements.
o Sponsor: Owns the budget and overall success of the IT project.
C. Architectural Considerations: Some aspects of information technology are becoming a
commodity with no upfront capital expenditure. Ever-growing social media networks are
changing the dynamics between customers and businesses. Hence innovation in the form of
digital services has become a necessity. Opportunities for open source technology adoption
has lowered the barrier for entry to anyone with a good idea to start experimenting with new
products or services. For businesses to stay genuinely competitive, they must embrace
software innovation as a differentiator within a culture of organizational agility.
The following are five essential guidelines to keep in mind when building solutions and
architectures that support the goal of agility.
© 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved.
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 Make the system fault tolerant: Things will fail, so develop applications to be resilient
and handle failure, and not just prevent it. Deal with flaws gracefully and do not let the
defects propagate to the point of causing a total collapse of the system.
 Build autonomous systems that reduce dependencies: To be able to move fast and
be agile from an organization or systems standpoint, design systems with dependency
thinking in mind. Implementing “loose coupling” in teams, technology, architecture, and
governance is needed. Autonomous teams and services enable companies to change
things quickly as required by the business, without impacting those services around the
whole enterprise system at large.
 Domain-driven design: Often the real complexity in software is not the technology, but
rather the ambiguous, circular, contradicting models that SMEs sort out in their heads on
the fly. Humans can understand models given some context. These models and the
context must be built-into the software to help users to be productive.
 Consumer contract driven design: The relationship between service providers and
service consumers is based upon a contract. There is an agreed-upon exchange that
provides value to both. As autonomous services are built, service providers must avoid
the mindset to put obligations on other teams and services that are out of their control or
ownership. Instead, they should focus on meeting promises with service consumers
gracefully and innovatively.
 Design with the purpose in mind as one size does not fit all: It is essential to
understand that distributed architectures (e.g., microservices architecture) that support
agility, come with their own drawbacks. These architectures are optimized for problems
that require the ability to change quickly. It may become difficult to understand the system
holistically and may be substantially harder to debug problems.
Design with portability in mind so that the applications can simultaneously be hosted internally and
public cloud platforms. Designing architecture based on loosely coupled microservices and multiple
small APIs for faster integration into different internal or external systems as this is more accessible
than dealing with single monolithic API.
D. Cross-functional Team: Below are some of the team members that are utilized across all
projects, and often their contributions are undermined.
o UX/UI team
o Agile coach/scrum master
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o DevOps teams (some enterprises call them the Release Management Team)
o Cybersecurity ninja’s
E. Identify the Skill Requirements and Provide Pro-active Training where gaps are found.
The following approaches are recommended.
o Partner with training institutes for crucial technology skills training
o On-demand online training subscriptions
o Hackathon culture or in-house coding challenges
o Budget for technology conference visits with training sessions
o Partner with the right companies to help with on-demand, pay-per-use, and staff
augmentation
F. Agile Scrum or Kanban Methodology for overall execution: Evaluate the right agile
methodologies that will work for the IT project.
o Agile Scrum helps to deliver time-boxed features. This might be useful particularly in
projects which are somewhat “from scratch.”
o Kanban is famous for incremental improvements. If the IT project sounds like a
modernization or migration, then Kanban might be a good fit.
G. Lean Software Approach: This might be useful in building Minimum Marketable Product
(MMP). Keep the focus on identifying and developing the “MMP” features and then fine-tune
the features (through user feedback) as the development progresses.
Clear Objectives: Quickly introduce features that matter most to the users and onboard them
sooner. Do not stop learning the users’ behavior as requirements keep evolving. Some hints for
successful user testing process:
o Identify those users who are receptive and motivated to provide the feedback.
o Develop a reward mechanism to motivate the users to provide feedback.
o If applicable use an A/B Testing paradigm. UX/UI focused projects can greatly benefit
with this approach.
Step 3 Outcome: The focus of this phase is to ship the solution to market as fast as possible to
hasten ROI realization. If the desired ROI is not achieved, then probably evaluate if the project can
be terminated and move on to the next.
© 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved.
12
The infographic below shows the before and after stages of digital transformation related to a
Marketing Automation project.
The client was using generic marketing and promotion campaigns which were not reaching the target
audience. Therefore, the client failed to meet their customer’s expectations. By using big data and
analytics, we helped the client run campaigns to target a specific audience with specific information.
Numerous studies were conducted that using big data and analytics of the campaign, efforts proved
the effectiveness of up to 350% and generated up to 60% more revenue.
The Genesys omnichannel Engagement Center study by Forrester Consulting further proves that
omnichannel engagement leads to better customer service, enhanced profitability and increased
ROI. Benefits of $37 million over five years versus implementation costs of $14 million, resulting in
a net present value (NPV) of over $22.8 million.6
Step 4. Optimize & Enhance
A successful implementation is often attributed to factors such as “high adoption of the product,” or
“providing the desired output,” or by measuring “happy customers,” or other similar approaches.
To achieve these outcomes, the focus should always be time-to-market, constant user feedback,
and testing during the development cycles. However, what often gets left out is the opportunity for
© 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved.
13
optimization. Therefore, it’s important to look at various ways of optimizing the project further after
the initial delivery. Optimization is often a focus on cost savings (“reducing the financial spend” or
“reduce manual workforce”) and to increase overall agility (“Increasing responsiveness”) for the
delivered IT project. Technology, process, and culture play a vital role in the optimization and
enhancement phase. Below are some ideas to implement these concepts.
A. Automation and DevOps: This area increases cost savings and reduces the total cost of
ownership (TCO.) Part of being agile involves building a robust delivery pipeline so IT projects
/ products can be delivered continuously and reliably.
B. Cloud Usage Optimization: Most IT projects today are delivered are software as a service
(SaaS) and leverage public cloud platforms. Initial architecture design favors the design
decisions towards easy to use infrastructure services rather than optimized infrastructure
usage. There are various strategies such as “containerization” and “auto-scale feature
implementation” that will ensure the resources used are minimum and yet enough to handle
the current load. This could lead to significant cost savings.
Test Automation: Post implementation, there is generally a ramp down of the IT project team, and
a small group is retained for bug fixes, enhancements, and testing. Test engineers are required to
do the regression testing to ensure the quality of the released application. Using test automation
strategies and tools, the IT team can be reduced significantly. Establishing test automation takes
time, but breakeven could be achieved in a few months rather than over a more extended period,
resulting in cost savings. Test automation should not be an afterthought. It should be put in place
up front as solutions are built following any methodologies (Agile, DSDM Atern, Waterfall, etc.)
during Step 3.
C. Kanban Dashboards Ensures Service Level Agreement (SLA) culture: Kanban is a
recommended approach for continuous improvement. Having a Kanban Dashboard, the flow
of improvement tasks can be tracked and ensured for completion. They help establish and
track SLA’s which guarantees the people on various tasks are held accountable.
D. Microservices Speed Up the Release of Software: Breaking application into smaller apps
which are independent, yet can talk to each other, can make the application maintainable.
Small or significant enhancements to applications result impacting the entire application
© 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved.
14
causing more extensive testing or alter release time. By having smaller independent apps,
the effect of a change is reduced inevitably, hence faster release of the software.
Optimization is a phase in which the ROI, which has started to become visible at the end of the
implementation phase, is now examined for additional ways to further increase. CxO’s and
shareholders focus on ROI continually. This needs to be part of every project and implementation.
Step 4 Outcome: Cost reduction, reduced time-to-market, increased adoption of IT and products
by employees, partners, customers, and vendors. Simplification and reduction of steps by
streamlining business processes.
Step 5. “+ 1” - Consider Communication for Creating Cultural Buy-In
The right amount of Information should be communicated at the right time, to the right audience.
This applies to both employees and partners (internally) and customers and vendors (externally.)
Culture: How to create and address culture inside each department and team members, so they
understand and adapt to the changes faster? It’s vital to decide when to communicate, what to talk
and the appropriate audience. The steps below are a few examples that are proven to be effective:
o Initial discussions with the core team (digital transformation commitment team)
o Conversations with the internal digital transformation extended team
o Interactions with external partners, suppliers, vendors, and customers
To build confidence, these types of communications are vital. The message must be that “there is a
new way of doing things.” This will initially cause confusion or inconvenience. However, the results
will be more user-friendliness and generally an improved working environment. Leadership should
communicate that the pain associated with adopting the new culture or changing the way of doing
things is temporary. If the results of transformation are achieved, the future will be more productive
for all.
The best results for experimentation comes with agility. Leadership should communicate that the
change in culture is required to achieve digital transformation. Every employee and department
should be aligned with the initiatives and adopt agility and lean mindset.
© 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved.
15
“The best results are achieved by being agile - not by just doing agile. Doing agile is implementing
the latest tools and training by agile experts. Being agile, on the other hand, is about the mindset
and culture. Like the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him to be a fisherman.
The longer-term and more reliable results come from a mindset – create being agile culture.” 7
Step 5. Outcome: The IT staff will start to view themselves as business strategists using pretotyping
techniques, agility mindset to build digital products that achieve profitability for the company and
supporting the C suite more closely. Business and IT will start working more closely to accomplish
the company vision, mission, and goals. The entire company, partners, and vendors will become
better oriented towards realizing company goals and better serve the stakeholders they support.
Conclusion:
For companies that get the business fundamentals of digital transformation right, they will not only
improve their odds of survival, but also excel in driving profitability by penetrating new markets,
providing optimized customer service and increasing revenue. Digital transformation is a journey
requiring strategy, agility, and perseverance. Outcomes will vary, but through collaboration,
communication and employing iterative methodologies contained in the Medha™ framework,
leaders can build enterprises using innovation and digital solutions that can take them to the next
level of success and profitability.
----------------------------
If you have found this article helpful, the tactics listed in the related article titled “Results Oriented
Digital Transformation: Overcoming 6 Pitfalls”, initially published in November 2016, may also be
helpful additional reading.
This article was written by Bala Guntipalli, Sr. VP of Technology & Operations at TechVelocity
Partners, global technology services company offering cost-effective, independent IT consulting
services focused on digital transformation and other game-changing technology strategies.
Bala’s expertise and two-plus decades of experience include broad IT innovation, strategy, project
management, product development, cybersecurity, P&L, and corporate development. He supports
strategic decision making around “partner”, “buy” or “build” decisions, enabling business strategies.
His success is driven by his passion for creative problem solving, design thinking, implementation of
agile methodologies, ability to build partnerships with onsite and offshore third-party providers.
© 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved.
16
Thank you to Steve K. Snyder, SteveS@TechVelocityPartners.com.com; CEO and Founder of Third
Meadow, LLC, a corporate growth consulting firm, for his contributions to this article.
If you would like to solve business problems cost-effectively or thinking of transforming your
business into an omnichannel digital enterprise for a better long-term marketplace position, please
contact me. We would be delighted to partner with you to accelerate your business success.
Bala Guntipalli
BalaG@TechVelocityPartners.com; 612 322 2470
Forrester Consulting, Gartner and McKinsey are registered trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc., Gartner
Inc. and Mckinsey & Company respectively.
1 Neville, Laurence. “THE TAKING THE LONG VIEW: Crises Demand Attention, But So Do Long-Term
Trends.” Global Finance, vol. 30, no. 4, Global Finance Media Inc., Apr. 2016, p. 8.
2 From disrupted to disruptor: Reinventing your business by transforming the core; Peter Dahlström, Liz
Ericson, Somesh Khanna, and Jürgen Meffert; February 2017; McKinsey & Company;
3 Technology Service Providers Must Implement a Bimodal Road Map or Risk Being Left Behind;
April 4 2016, Gartner, Inc.
4 Technology Service Providers Must Implement a Bimodal Roadmap or Risk Irrelevance and
Decline; Published: 7 December 2015 | Refreshed: 4 April 2017, Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates
5. Results Oriented Digital Transformation: Overcoming 6 Pitfalls; Bala Guntipalli, Author / Sr. VP-Technology
and Operations; November 2016, TechVelocityPartners.com
6 The Total Economic Impact™ Of The Genesys Omnichannel Engagement Center Solution
A Multi-Company Cost Savings and Business Value Analysis for Enterprises; Commissioned by Genesys in
February 2016, and study conducted by Forrester Research, Inc.
7 Results Oriented Digital Transformation: Overcoming 6 Pitfalls; Bala Guntipalli, Author / Sr. VP-Technology
and Operations; November 2016, Singular Technology Group LLC, SingularTG.com

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5 Steps to Effectively Handle Digital Transformation and Business Disruption: A Framework for Digitalization

  • 1. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 1 5 Steps to Effectively Handle Digital Transformation and Business Disruption: A Framework for Digitalization Digital technology continues to change the business world dramatically. This article provides business and IT leaders’ helpful tools to drive and manage digital transformation effectively. The Why: “Digital is the main reason just over half the companies on the Fortune 500 have disappeared since the year 2000”1 – Pierre Nanterme, Chairman, and CEO of Accenture. “Companies must be open to radical reinvention to find new, significant, and sustainable sources of revenue”2 – McKinsey, a global management consulting firm. The How: As a strategic part of the everyday business, the role of the IT team is shifting from the “keep the lights on” era to the “use of digital technologies to win” era. The benefits of digital technology are best understood in the context of one’s organization. Digitalization should not be considered as just another shiny IT project because it impacts the entire enterprise. It is a crucial tool enabling growth strategy for most businesses. This document aims to offer a “4+1 digital transformation” approach which brings together thought leaders, execution teams, SME’s, customers, and partners to help collectively outperform the organization’s status quo. In this paper, we propose a simple, yet effective framework for leaders to conceptualize both the process and possible IT tools within The Medha Framework™, consisting of 4 + 1 steps to digital transformation. This will assist the companies to increase revenue, provide better customer service, create maximum impact, improve speed to market for new products, and boost ROI. The Medha™ TechVelocityPartner.com’s approach also supports the “+1 “step of creating a being culture of innovation and communication. Digital transformation should be considered both from the employee and partner facing (inward) and from the customer-facing dimension (outward.)
  • 2. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 2 Medha Framework ™ Approach to Digital Transformation Step 1. Defining the Strategy The first step in the digital transformation effort is establishing a digital transformation strategy. This should be in sync with the company’s business strategy, as well as, with the 5-year strategic plan. It should identify and focus on short-term and long-term wins that can impact the business positively. This should be looked as an agile version of business planning with various moving parts. The following key objectives for digitalization are typically valid for most organizations. o Program enhancement: Establish business programs that have a direct impact on business functioning directly or indirectly. Describe each program or action concerning “desirability,” “feasibility” and “viability.” o Financial implications: Obtain a high-level understanding of the cost and investment implications as well as potential return on each program/action. To bring structure to the strategy and to achieve the objectives mentioned above, the following guidelines are recommended: A. Form a Digital Transformation Management Commitment Team: Choose executives from various functions with forward-looking mindsets who will become the key decision makers or influencers for the entire program.
  • 3. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 3 B. Potential Impact: Invest in conference visits or in-house sessions by experts to help the digital transformation commitment team see the possible effects and returns of digital implementations. It’s essential that the team considers the digital transformation as a game changer and not merely another company initiative to increase revenue. Profitability is ultimately important but focusing on the numbers alone too soon will destroy the creativity of strategic visioning that is key to digital transformation. C. Make Customers, Vendors and Partners’ part of the Transformation Journey: Visit the customers, vendors, and partners to understand what they think of the service and products offered currently. Identify trusted confidants who can give genuine feedback on the plan and as well as with whom the transformation journey can be shared. D. Key Players: Identify and include various individuals in the organization who need to play an active role during this journey. Identify Core Concerns: Identify concerns, problems as well as opportunities across the organization. They become the foundation for transformation. Here are some issues, few customers most frequently-cited: o Provide Omnichannel experiences: Improve customer experience with an eye to improving retention rates and lowering customer turnover by providing consistent omnichannel experiences and seamless customer experience by making decisions based on data, context and sharing customer information updates across all engagement channels. o Increase Brand Loyalty: Provide real-time customer information to the service agents across all channels to avoid asking the same questions. This, in turn, may pave the way for first-time visitors become customers and then deep-rooted loyalty to the brand. o Attract Employees and Partners: Attract partners, employees, and suppliers by improving engagement and maintaining consistency across channels. o Increase Responsiveness: Provide faster response to customers, partners, and employees. o Manage Threats to the Business: Emerging startups with threatening business models. o Capture Global Opportunities: Expanding to new geographies and vertical markets.
  • 4. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 4 o Exploit New Sales Channel Opportunities: Potential to leverage new business channels or move to new verticals. o Increase New Customer Acquisition: The single most significant source of growth. Talking to the customers, partners, employees and creating forums with cross-functional teams, etc. are few ways of increasing new customer acquisition. F. IT Modernization: In most cases, digital transformation is built on top of the existing enterprise IT. Hence, it is essential to consider IT modernization itself as an activity. To ensure the IT team is empowered enough for the transformation journey analyzing the following eight components is recommended:  Customer experience platforms  Enterprise integration strategy  Data and analytics strategy  Infrastructure management and cloud enablement  Enterprise security and cybersecurity  Release management and implementation program  IT response time  Enterprise IT architecture A gap analysis of the above points will help the digital transformation commitment team understand the scope and investments required to support the journey. G. Cross-pollination: Include team members from other functions and “outside of the industry” specialists in brainstorming sessions to analyze the “gap analysis” and see how they approached digitalization journey, and the lessons learned. In some cases, real change and maximum benefits from transformation may be achieved by looking and comparing problem and solutions from other industries. Bring in experts who worked in multiple domains and across different sectors. To solve long-standing problems, do not approach the solution just from one’s industry. Step1 Outcome: To be successful, digital transformation leaders must first understand, communicate and agree with CxO’s on the expected outcomes of the initiatives. Metrics for business programs and actions must be identified, as well as discussing the risks and probabilities of success for each program and activity.
  • 5. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 5 Case study: Below is a feasibility study created for a B2B e-commerce/marketing company whose leadership wanted to pursue technology as a competitive advantage that shows how these principles work in practice. Here is an example feasibility study report for the initial phase of digitalizing the processes and operations in a high growth B2B e-commerce company in 2017: Project Increasing responsiveness for suppliers and distributors Problem / Opportunity Statement Supply chain management (SCM) process: Entire SCM process requires an exchange of various documents such as PR, PO, Invoices, QC documents, etc. This entire process is manual and slows down the supply and distribution cycles, and plenty of room for human errors when data is entered is manually Desirability Highly desirable for following reasons:  Opportunity to reduce human errors, which is 12% of the total time  A chance to reduce processing times by 50%  Helps in increasing onboarding of suppliers and distributors by 90% monthly can aid to scale the business rapidly Feasibility  Technology feasibility: Digital process automation solutions and integration technologies are available and mature enough to implement the solution(s) Viability  Cost viability: There are established tools in the market such as Dell Boomi (iPaas) and OCR technologies (Kofax) which could be tested on a subscription basis (try before you buy.) Amount invested vs. the ROI is around 56 % in two years  Skills viability: Very active system integration partner ecosystem with strong credentials In addition to the business cases, key professionals who will lead the digital transformation journey, gap analysis for IT modernization, as well as an estimate of investments required, should be identified. Step 2. Design and Planning The “Bimodal IT Approach” by Gartner states, “Providers that fail to co-innovate with their customers will not realize the full potential of digital business.” 3
  • 6. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 6 To establish programs, design and implementation details are needed. One of the best ways to develop these details is to adopt the following three-stage approach concerning each business case:  Design Thinking Sessions: To arrive at solutions to the identified program.  Proof-Of-Value (PoV): To confirm that the identified solution does solve the program’s business issue.  Formulating the IT Project plan: Based on the solution identified and learnings from PoV conducted, develop a project plan and get ready for implementation. Design Thinking Sessions: Use of design thinking workshops, hackathons, and appropriate means the team must generate ideas to address business cases; i.e., create PoV to validate concepts quickly and cost-effectively. Gartner further suggests, “Mode 2 of Nonlinear IT is used where there is a need to be exploratory in the pursuit of new business designs, processes and models, and there is a prioritization of speed over reliability.” 4 This approach reduces risk and increases the chance of ultimate success of projects or initiatives. To realize better results from “Mode 2”, a review of current literature on the subject combined with the experiences of the author, endorses an approach utilizing agile philosophy to take stock of the gathered insights to create maximum impact, increased speed of implementation and overall enhanced ROI. The winning companies are those that are “being agile” within an agile culture vs. just implementing or “doing agile.” Sometimes the best ideas/solutions come from employees, because they may understand the problems better. Companies may get the best results when internal experts work in collaboration with external digital transformation experts. Whoever is engaged in design thinking, they should not lose focus on the problems users (customers) are experiencing during the entire journey. Best results of design thinking come when issues can be identified before users notice them and possible solutions are brainstormed during the design thinking process. Design thinking itself can be broken down into a five-step framework for out of box thinking, utilizing brainstorming, prioritization and thinking without boundaries. 1. Empathize: To find an appropriate solution, first, one must understand the problem from the user perspective and empathize.
  • 7. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 7 2. Define: Stephen Covey’s “Begin with the end in mind” philosophy applies literally to design thinking. Start with end-state and work backward. Design the future state of each process without regard to current constraint, e.g., shorten process turnaround time from days to hours. Reflect on the problem and define the problem and a plan. 3. Ideate: The team imagines innovative solutions. Work with the graphics designer to draw pictures of the issue, and various solutions discussed in the previous stages and repeat the process. Have the internal experts collaborate with external digital transformation experts who can solve more significant problems with a collaborative mindset. Internal experts know the domain, product, employees, and customers. Provide them with training and tools. Find passionate, qualified consultants who can teach internal leaders and experts to conduct this work on their own. 4. Prototyping: Most often companies and teams make a mistake, spending a lot of resources by moving directly to an expensive and time-consuming prototyping stage. Preferably this should be a genuine pretotyping effort to get to the next logical step in the prototyping process. The solution should be brought to life in incremental steps. Exhausting resources during this stage cannot help to deliver the best solutions to the end user. Always get feedback from the end-users and continue to fine tune as the project moves forward.  Slice the prototyping process into smaller portions. Test the service/product with real users for usability/acceptance of the same before investing substantial resources.  Use pretotyping techniques, gather feedback early, and process the outcomes scientifically. If it makes sense from the customer point of view, move forward with the idea/product or scrap it and move on to the next.  Look into creative ways of pretotyping - incrementally and empirically. 5. Testing: During this stage repeat the process multiple times to identify weaknesses and opportunities to improve the process or implementation. “Design thinking, innovation, and ‘out of the box thinking’ do not come from ‘blinding insights’ or from episodic training programs. They come from a culture of open communication of ideas, and from approaching problems and solutions from different perspectives over time.” 5
  • 8. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 8 Step 2 Pre-outcome: By this time of the Design and Planning stage, a concrete solution to the business case is identified. It is possible that multiple programs might get grouped into one overall business project with a solution proposed within the project plan. Proof-Of-Value (PoV): The business case and the identified solution(s) in the above step must be validated and ascertained by clearly defining the PoV. Depending on the circumstances more than one can be used. Appropriate approach will depend on the nature of the program and the problem it is solving. Some approaches are highlighted below: 1. Hackathon: Helps in building prototypes in a short period. A valuable approach when the solution is dependent on cutting-edge technologies, and there are concerns regarding the feasibility of the technology. 2. Minimum Viable Product (MVP): This might be valuable if the solution or problem being addressed pertains to the customer behavior. Therefore, building an MVP, which can be tested with actual users for accurate feedback, is the best way to validate the solution. 3. Surveys: A cost-effective approach. This approach gets clear user feedback. It can be a very successful method if the target segment is either internal employees or partners. Step 2 Outcome: Based on the PoV and cost–benefit analysis, the digital transformation commitment team is now able to decide whether it’s worth pursuing the project. Hence one should expect some programs are dropped, and others endorsed strongly. Formulating the IT Project plan: By now it should be clear which projects need to be pursued. It is vital that the digital transformation commitment team start planning for its execution, budgeting, and team creation. At this point, a formal project plan should be written and agreed upon by all stakeholders. Apart from the solutions identified through the design thinking sessions, it is recommended that the IT modernization projects also need to be a part of the project plan. Step 3. Implementation By now the digital transformation commitment team should have a clear idea of what IT projects / products need to be delivered. Based on inputs from the previous stages, work on specifications and expectations so that the IT team can successfully fulfill the requirements for transformation. The following approach toward each of the identified IT project is recommended.
  • 9. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 9 A. Establish a Global IT Steering Commitment / Governance team: Establish a Global IT steering commitment/governance team that can prioritize, estimate and approve projects. The commitment team is comprised of an Enterprise architecture team, Functional SME’s and Business stakeholders. o Enterprise architecture team: Owns the Enterprise IT architecture, platform adoption and technology direction to all IT projects. Also gives estimates for the projects identified. o Functional SME: Owns the definition and direction of the IT project from the business point of view. o Business stakeholders: Govern the ROI aspects of each project, hence control the budget and other financial support for the success of IT projects. B. Establish the Project Specific Governance Model: Four key teams are essential for the success of the entire project portfolio. o Architecture team: Owns the project-specific IT architecture. They report to the enterprise architecture Team. o Engineering team: Owns the delivery of the IT project. Often headed by a project manager and consists of developers and testers. o Product owner: Owns the functional success of the IT project. Often dictates the functional requirements. o Sponsor: Owns the budget and overall success of the IT project. C. Architectural Considerations: Some aspects of information technology are becoming a commodity with no upfront capital expenditure. Ever-growing social media networks are changing the dynamics between customers and businesses. Hence innovation in the form of digital services has become a necessity. Opportunities for open source technology adoption has lowered the barrier for entry to anyone with a good idea to start experimenting with new products or services. For businesses to stay genuinely competitive, they must embrace software innovation as a differentiator within a culture of organizational agility. The following are five essential guidelines to keep in mind when building solutions and architectures that support the goal of agility.
  • 10. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 10  Make the system fault tolerant: Things will fail, so develop applications to be resilient and handle failure, and not just prevent it. Deal with flaws gracefully and do not let the defects propagate to the point of causing a total collapse of the system.  Build autonomous systems that reduce dependencies: To be able to move fast and be agile from an organization or systems standpoint, design systems with dependency thinking in mind. Implementing “loose coupling” in teams, technology, architecture, and governance is needed. Autonomous teams and services enable companies to change things quickly as required by the business, without impacting those services around the whole enterprise system at large.  Domain-driven design: Often the real complexity in software is not the technology, but rather the ambiguous, circular, contradicting models that SMEs sort out in their heads on the fly. Humans can understand models given some context. These models and the context must be built-into the software to help users to be productive.  Consumer contract driven design: The relationship between service providers and service consumers is based upon a contract. There is an agreed-upon exchange that provides value to both. As autonomous services are built, service providers must avoid the mindset to put obligations on other teams and services that are out of their control or ownership. Instead, they should focus on meeting promises with service consumers gracefully and innovatively.  Design with the purpose in mind as one size does not fit all: It is essential to understand that distributed architectures (e.g., microservices architecture) that support agility, come with their own drawbacks. These architectures are optimized for problems that require the ability to change quickly. It may become difficult to understand the system holistically and may be substantially harder to debug problems. Design with portability in mind so that the applications can simultaneously be hosted internally and public cloud platforms. Designing architecture based on loosely coupled microservices and multiple small APIs for faster integration into different internal or external systems as this is more accessible than dealing with single monolithic API. D. Cross-functional Team: Below are some of the team members that are utilized across all projects, and often their contributions are undermined. o UX/UI team o Agile coach/scrum master
  • 11. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 11 o DevOps teams (some enterprises call them the Release Management Team) o Cybersecurity ninja’s E. Identify the Skill Requirements and Provide Pro-active Training where gaps are found. The following approaches are recommended. o Partner with training institutes for crucial technology skills training o On-demand online training subscriptions o Hackathon culture or in-house coding challenges o Budget for technology conference visits with training sessions o Partner with the right companies to help with on-demand, pay-per-use, and staff augmentation F. Agile Scrum or Kanban Methodology for overall execution: Evaluate the right agile methodologies that will work for the IT project. o Agile Scrum helps to deliver time-boxed features. This might be useful particularly in projects which are somewhat “from scratch.” o Kanban is famous for incremental improvements. If the IT project sounds like a modernization or migration, then Kanban might be a good fit. G. Lean Software Approach: This might be useful in building Minimum Marketable Product (MMP). Keep the focus on identifying and developing the “MMP” features and then fine-tune the features (through user feedback) as the development progresses. Clear Objectives: Quickly introduce features that matter most to the users and onboard them sooner. Do not stop learning the users’ behavior as requirements keep evolving. Some hints for successful user testing process: o Identify those users who are receptive and motivated to provide the feedback. o Develop a reward mechanism to motivate the users to provide feedback. o If applicable use an A/B Testing paradigm. UX/UI focused projects can greatly benefit with this approach. Step 3 Outcome: The focus of this phase is to ship the solution to market as fast as possible to hasten ROI realization. If the desired ROI is not achieved, then probably evaluate if the project can be terminated and move on to the next.
  • 12. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 12 The infographic below shows the before and after stages of digital transformation related to a Marketing Automation project. The client was using generic marketing and promotion campaigns which were not reaching the target audience. Therefore, the client failed to meet their customer’s expectations. By using big data and analytics, we helped the client run campaigns to target a specific audience with specific information. Numerous studies were conducted that using big data and analytics of the campaign, efforts proved the effectiveness of up to 350% and generated up to 60% more revenue. The Genesys omnichannel Engagement Center study by Forrester Consulting further proves that omnichannel engagement leads to better customer service, enhanced profitability and increased ROI. Benefits of $37 million over five years versus implementation costs of $14 million, resulting in a net present value (NPV) of over $22.8 million.6 Step 4. Optimize & Enhance A successful implementation is often attributed to factors such as “high adoption of the product,” or “providing the desired output,” or by measuring “happy customers,” or other similar approaches. To achieve these outcomes, the focus should always be time-to-market, constant user feedback, and testing during the development cycles. However, what often gets left out is the opportunity for
  • 13. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 13 optimization. Therefore, it’s important to look at various ways of optimizing the project further after the initial delivery. Optimization is often a focus on cost savings (“reducing the financial spend” or “reduce manual workforce”) and to increase overall agility (“Increasing responsiveness”) for the delivered IT project. Technology, process, and culture play a vital role in the optimization and enhancement phase. Below are some ideas to implement these concepts. A. Automation and DevOps: This area increases cost savings and reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO.) Part of being agile involves building a robust delivery pipeline so IT projects / products can be delivered continuously and reliably. B. Cloud Usage Optimization: Most IT projects today are delivered are software as a service (SaaS) and leverage public cloud platforms. Initial architecture design favors the design decisions towards easy to use infrastructure services rather than optimized infrastructure usage. There are various strategies such as “containerization” and “auto-scale feature implementation” that will ensure the resources used are minimum and yet enough to handle the current load. This could lead to significant cost savings. Test Automation: Post implementation, there is generally a ramp down of the IT project team, and a small group is retained for bug fixes, enhancements, and testing. Test engineers are required to do the regression testing to ensure the quality of the released application. Using test automation strategies and tools, the IT team can be reduced significantly. Establishing test automation takes time, but breakeven could be achieved in a few months rather than over a more extended period, resulting in cost savings. Test automation should not be an afterthought. It should be put in place up front as solutions are built following any methodologies (Agile, DSDM Atern, Waterfall, etc.) during Step 3. C. Kanban Dashboards Ensures Service Level Agreement (SLA) culture: Kanban is a recommended approach for continuous improvement. Having a Kanban Dashboard, the flow of improvement tasks can be tracked and ensured for completion. They help establish and track SLA’s which guarantees the people on various tasks are held accountable. D. Microservices Speed Up the Release of Software: Breaking application into smaller apps which are independent, yet can talk to each other, can make the application maintainable. Small or significant enhancements to applications result impacting the entire application
  • 14. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 14 causing more extensive testing or alter release time. By having smaller independent apps, the effect of a change is reduced inevitably, hence faster release of the software. Optimization is a phase in which the ROI, which has started to become visible at the end of the implementation phase, is now examined for additional ways to further increase. CxO’s and shareholders focus on ROI continually. This needs to be part of every project and implementation. Step 4 Outcome: Cost reduction, reduced time-to-market, increased adoption of IT and products by employees, partners, customers, and vendors. Simplification and reduction of steps by streamlining business processes. Step 5. “+ 1” - Consider Communication for Creating Cultural Buy-In The right amount of Information should be communicated at the right time, to the right audience. This applies to both employees and partners (internally) and customers and vendors (externally.) Culture: How to create and address culture inside each department and team members, so they understand and adapt to the changes faster? It’s vital to decide when to communicate, what to talk and the appropriate audience. The steps below are a few examples that are proven to be effective: o Initial discussions with the core team (digital transformation commitment team) o Conversations with the internal digital transformation extended team o Interactions with external partners, suppliers, vendors, and customers To build confidence, these types of communications are vital. The message must be that “there is a new way of doing things.” This will initially cause confusion or inconvenience. However, the results will be more user-friendliness and generally an improved working environment. Leadership should communicate that the pain associated with adopting the new culture or changing the way of doing things is temporary. If the results of transformation are achieved, the future will be more productive for all. The best results for experimentation comes with agility. Leadership should communicate that the change in culture is required to achieve digital transformation. Every employee and department should be aligned with the initiatives and adopt agility and lean mindset.
  • 15. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 15 “The best results are achieved by being agile - not by just doing agile. Doing agile is implementing the latest tools and training by agile experts. Being agile, on the other hand, is about the mindset and culture. Like the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him to be a fisherman. The longer-term and more reliable results come from a mindset – create being agile culture.” 7 Step 5. Outcome: The IT staff will start to view themselves as business strategists using pretotyping techniques, agility mindset to build digital products that achieve profitability for the company and supporting the C suite more closely. Business and IT will start working more closely to accomplish the company vision, mission, and goals. The entire company, partners, and vendors will become better oriented towards realizing company goals and better serve the stakeholders they support. Conclusion: For companies that get the business fundamentals of digital transformation right, they will not only improve their odds of survival, but also excel in driving profitability by penetrating new markets, providing optimized customer service and increasing revenue. Digital transformation is a journey requiring strategy, agility, and perseverance. Outcomes will vary, but through collaboration, communication and employing iterative methodologies contained in the Medha™ framework, leaders can build enterprises using innovation and digital solutions that can take them to the next level of success and profitability. ---------------------------- If you have found this article helpful, the tactics listed in the related article titled “Results Oriented Digital Transformation: Overcoming 6 Pitfalls”, initially published in November 2016, may also be helpful additional reading. This article was written by Bala Guntipalli, Sr. VP of Technology & Operations at TechVelocity Partners, global technology services company offering cost-effective, independent IT consulting services focused on digital transformation and other game-changing technology strategies. Bala’s expertise and two-plus decades of experience include broad IT innovation, strategy, project management, product development, cybersecurity, P&L, and corporate development. He supports strategic decision making around “partner”, “buy” or “build” decisions, enabling business strategies. His success is driven by his passion for creative problem solving, design thinking, implementation of agile methodologies, ability to build partnerships with onsite and offshore third-party providers.
  • 16. © 2018 TechVelocityPartners.com. All rights reserved. 16 Thank you to Steve K. Snyder, SteveS@TechVelocityPartners.com.com; CEO and Founder of Third Meadow, LLC, a corporate growth consulting firm, for his contributions to this article. If you would like to solve business problems cost-effectively or thinking of transforming your business into an omnichannel digital enterprise for a better long-term marketplace position, please contact me. We would be delighted to partner with you to accelerate your business success. Bala Guntipalli BalaG@TechVelocityPartners.com; 612 322 2470 Forrester Consulting, Gartner and McKinsey are registered trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc., Gartner Inc. and Mckinsey & Company respectively. 1 Neville, Laurence. “THE TAKING THE LONG VIEW: Crises Demand Attention, But So Do Long-Term Trends.” Global Finance, vol. 30, no. 4, Global Finance Media Inc., Apr. 2016, p. 8. 2 From disrupted to disruptor: Reinventing your business by transforming the core; Peter Dahlström, Liz Ericson, Somesh Khanna, and Jürgen Meffert; February 2017; McKinsey & Company; 3 Technology Service Providers Must Implement a Bimodal Road Map or Risk Being Left Behind; April 4 2016, Gartner, Inc. 4 Technology Service Providers Must Implement a Bimodal Roadmap or Risk Irrelevance and Decline; Published: 7 December 2015 | Refreshed: 4 April 2017, Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates 5. Results Oriented Digital Transformation: Overcoming 6 Pitfalls; Bala Guntipalli, Author / Sr. VP-Technology and Operations; November 2016, TechVelocityPartners.com 6 The Total Economic Impact™ Of The Genesys Omnichannel Engagement Center Solution A Multi-Company Cost Savings and Business Value Analysis for Enterprises; Commissioned by Genesys in February 2016, and study conducted by Forrester Research, Inc. 7 Results Oriented Digital Transformation: Overcoming 6 Pitfalls; Bala Guntipalli, Author / Sr. VP-Technology and Operations; November 2016, Singular Technology Group LLC, SingularTG.com