Roslan Rashidi – Vice President of Sales, TM One

“DX journey is an agile one. It will evolve along the way, one iteration after another. The magic will happen when the innovation across the four pillars of CX, EX, Digitisation and entrepreneurship collide.”

Where do we begin our digital transformation (DX) journey? This is often the subject of the many conversations I have with business leaders.

Developing and executing the new vision is quite a formidable task and is a key deterrent for companies to begin their transformation journeys. At the heart of it, DX is a fundamental redesign of the business strategy in how it unlocks value for its stakeholders.

The answers may not all be apparent on day one, but the journey of embracing an agile development process can begin today. Through this insight, I hope to illustrate how you can kick start your DX journey across four (4) distinct pillars.  

Pillar 1: Build new digital businesses
Pillar 2: Digitise operational processes
Pillar 3: Customer Experience
Pillar 4: Employee Experience

#1 New Digital Businesses

Start exploring digital products that compliment your existing business. The review of customer journeys will provide insights into unmet needs that could be fulfilled by your company. Successful companies have followed the following steps to build new digital businesses:

1. Acquire start-ups offering digital products in your industry or its adjacents
2. Incubate new digital businesses in-house by encouraging entrepreneurship within the company
3. Build an accelerator that enables start-ups as well as your partner ecosystem to collaborate on developing new innovative products or services

#2 Digitise operational processes

The full benefit of DX unlocks when you can democratise innovation and digitisation across all operational processes in your company. Enable every single business units across the company (Finance, Human Resources, R&D, Manufacturing, etc.) to embrace digitisation. The key steps you can follow include:

1. Assign Innovation and Digital Officers in each of the major business units in your company
2. Provide the business units with dedicated IT staff to support digitisation efforts
3. Build cross-functional teams to review progress and explore collaboration across business units

#3 Customer Experience:

Customers are spending more and more time on digital and social platforms. They are constantly discovering new products and services there.

The much lower cost of digital engagements and services compared to traditional measures are key drivers supporting this trend. This means your business must transition rapidly to acquire, transact and engage with customers digitally. To track digital customer success, institute the following measures:

1. Percentage of customers acquired digitally
2. Digital transaction as a percentage of total business
3. Digital engagement rates (number of page visits, time spent browsing, interactions, etc)

#4 Talent transformation

This is arguably the toughest piece of the DX strategy pillar. Your company needs to acquire talent with new digital skills while reskilling existing teams. You will have to compete with start-ups as well as technology giants to attract the digital native workforce to your firm. Deploy these strategies to set up your company for success:

1. Build a programme to acquire digital native tech talent
2. Reskill existing teams with digital expertise through incentives and training
3. Enhance employee experience by reviewing end-to-end employee journeys
4. Explore gig-economy business model to augment the company’s talent needs

The 13 initiatives across the four (4) pillars are a great way to get started on your DX journey. The exponential impact of digital is unlocked when these 13 initiatives intersect and present more innovation opportunities.

A strong leadership backed with the rigour of regular reviews will help you succeed and build the enterprise of the future. The important thing is, to get started.