After being active as a Digital Transformation consultant for one month now, I finally want to explain - Why DX Consulting? The reason behind why I started my own consulting firm and why I wanted it to be linked directly to the Digital Transformation phenomenon.
It starts with the abbreviation "DX" - short for Digital Transformation. Everywhere you see this topic popping up lately, and certainly after COVID-19. It's undeniable, the DX movement is everywhere and companies are finally feeling its value. Does that mean that only now companies started investing in digitalisation? Certainly not! But what's truly becoming important is the difference between Digitisation and Digitalisation. If you didn't pay attention then you might not even see the two-letter difference between these words. And that's also exactly how easy people - certainly managers - are able to confuse those two.
It's undeniable, the DX movement is everywhere and companies are finally feeling its value.
Digitisation is the act of translating an analogue process into a digital copy of that process. Important here is to mention the word "copy" - because that's what most companies have been doing the last decade or longer. They've observed and decided that manual, human processes were no longer efficient enough and that we should replace them by digital processes that had exactly the same capabilities but improved performance and less mistakes. Unfortunately, many of these manual processes had flaws - and we just mirrored those flaws into the new digital process. While companies had the chance to investigate their business processes and improve them, the only thing most of us did was copy. When looking back at why this happened and why it is still happening - it becomes clear for me that most people don't take the time to analyse their processes again. We should go back to the drawing board more often and free our minds of current limitations. Why? I think because it’s just soo comfortable and tempting to give the “Please copy this process assignment”. It feels like we shouldn’t spend time on analysing our needs again since we’ve been executing the process this way for so long now.
We should go back to the drawing board more often and free our minds of current limitations.
It almost sounds like I am against digitisation now so please allow me to give this some context. Of course, to reach digitalisation one must take the first step to simply ”digitise“. And don't take me wrong - this first step already offers soo many great advantages! Like the fact that finally we have digital data in a way that we can truly benefit from it. We no longer have paper sheets that are scanned, archived and never to be used - but still consume an insane amount of space. Just take as an example the visitor registration process where people had to write down their name on a sheet of paper together with the time of arrival and their company details. That’s where most modern companies - now also pushed by COVID-19 of course - made the transition to a digital form that has to be filled in on a tablet. Great, right? We now fill in the exact same information by typing instead of writing... Well, at least we can now learn from our data. What are the most popular visit times? How many visitors do we receive on average? Which periods of the year should our business close due to a lack of visitors? Really just simple statistics and visualisation by using dashboards are already an amazing step forward.
When we talk about Digitalisation it's where it get's really interesting because we are no longer copying processes but we are taking advantage of a digital process to really achieve greater things. It's no longer about doing the exact same thing with digital processes but it's about re-thinking the whole process. Elaborating on my previous example, the visitor registration process. Imagine the visitor filling in the digital registration form, and taking most of its data from an authentication service like OAuth because filling in your name, email, phone number, etc. is getting really boring right? What about next time the visitor arrives and we automatically check him in based on the GPS location of his phone - or a Bluetooth connection that detected his presence? And automatically the person that has a meeting with this visitor is notified by the Reception chat bot. When the visitor leaves the building he is asked to vote if his visit was satisfying or not with a simple message on his smartwatch. The possibilities are endles how this visitor experience can be enhanced by connectivity and integration.
It's no longer about doing the exact same thing with digital processes but it's about re-thinking the whole process.
And that's again something crucial about digitalisation: connectivity and integration. A topic I am currently working on. How to create smart low-code applications that can interact with company data coming from holy grails like ERP and CRM systems. Another thing I must point out when talking about this topic is the different approach required to reach digitalisation. You are no longer setting requirements upfront but you are discovering new technologies every day that inspire you to realise ideas in totally different ways than you would expect at the beginning. Technology-driven innovation is the way forward in my opinion. Another topic that needs to be discussed in a new blog post.
With the foundation of DX Consulting my goal is to reach a digital transformation partnership status with companies based on our digitalisation capabilities. DX Consulting shall accompany those companies in need of a partner to realise these new solutions where knowledge of the latest methodologies and technologies are required. Fundamental for this is the ability to adapt to new environments at an incredible pace and the skill to link the dots between those rapidly emerging technologies. I am so incredibly excited to start this adventure, to drive innovation, encounter success and overcome failures, but always to keep dreaming about a digital future.
Stay tuned to discover more and please reach out to me if you want to discuss in more detail!
Comments