Future of Digital Transformation

Future is where it belongs

We are leaving the predictions of the future in the better hands of the Simpsons. However, we want to address the steady rise leading to a significant increase in the focus of digital transformation and its trends addressing different technological and organisational aspects. We understand and we also want you to note that digital transformation is a pervasive field today starting with a lack of a universally accepted definition, to begin with. In this blog, we want to consolidate existing fundamentals of digital transformation from the available information systems and map the territory by sharing important macro- and micro-level observations. At this moment, all we could do is develop inductive thematic maps which identify the technologies, their processes and the people as the axes for the graph of the future of digital transformation. 

It has been a tough ride for us to meander between technological disruption on one side and corporate entrepreneurship on the other. And we realised that the pace of digital transformation, the culture and work environment, and the middle management perspective is significantly underdeveloped. While we concluded the previous two blogs - the history and the scope of digital transformation - with the changes digital technologies can bring about in a company’s business model, products and organisational structures. Now, we have decided that the challenge is really for the managers, the skilled employees and the executives to reveal its transformative power. Technological disruptions helped us in deriving implications regarding technology adoption and integration. Burdened with the legacies of old technology, bureaucratic structures and core rigidities, companies may face major challenges in this respect during the journey of digital transformation. 

Corporate entrepreneurship 

Corporate entrepreneurship is expected to add a more holistic perspective on internal processes during their transformational journey, such as managing the influence of knowledge over organisational learning. These steps help us understand the current topography of digital transformation better. Companies are developing a systematic and structured analysis and are drawing digital transformation maps which inductively categorise and describe their courses of action vis-à-vis their plans of action. These maps have identified technologies, processes and people as the aggregate dimensions of digital transformation. Within these dimensions, there are innumerable folds of mystery that need disentangling the particularities of every process. Such a surgical view emphasises the most influential and unique antecedents against the consequences of this specific type of transformation. Thus, it becomes possible to identify the predominant contextual factors for which one process a company follows might be different from the same process followed by a different company. 

The advancement of the understanding and elaboration of these opportunities are integrated into the definitions of digital transformation for that particular company. In corporate entrepreneurship, we can also see that the important middle management perspective on digital transformation has thus far been neglected by legacy enterprises. Emerging from these standalone cases, there will also arise a need to review the various options for integrating digital transformation within organisational architectures and existing processes. This meandered pathway has to become a royal middle pathway that will strengthen the valuable management perspective within the processes-related based discussions on digital transformation. This way, companies can avoid the reinvention of the wheel and the same time enable the identification of cross-disciplinary opportunities allowing the play required by those operational segments. Technologies can become a major determinant of organisational form and structure in the coming years. 

Extrapolating today’s trends 

Off late, because of a decline of interest in this relationship between technology adoption and integration, innovations in information technologies and the rise of post-internet technologies have revitalised their relevance in the context of organisational transformation. The focus of corporate entrepreneurship on technological disruption will catch considerable attention. In fact, as a digital transformation company, we, ourselves argue that the companies must experience fundamental transformations for effective IT implementation. This had to be the road more travelled since the nineties, however, in the years a shift of attention occurred from technological to managerial and organisational issues, which, in retrospect, was for the better. But now, non-technological aspects such as leadership, culture, and employee training are being found to be equally important for successful IT-enables transformation. 

The amalgamation of technology, people, and processes will become the thread from which the fabric of an organisational history will be woven. Digital technologies are considered a major asset for leveraging organisational transformation, given their disruptive nature and cross-organisational and systemic effects. To achieve successful digital transformation, changes must occur at various levels within the organization, including an adaptation of the core business, the exchange of resources and capabilities, the reconfiguration of processes and structures, adjustments in leadership, and the implementation of a vivid digital culture. Every organization should be able to conceptualise this method of digital transformation at the intercept of the adoption of disruptive digital technologies on the one side and organisational transformation of capabilities, structures, processes and business model components on the other side. 

Each to his own

Hence, there will be a widespread methodology that looks into both perspectives of digital transformation within organizations will be captured - a technology-centric and people-centric perspective - the processes will be devised around these two. Companies tomorrow will exploit the technology-centric perspective that will lead to technological disruption and merge it with the story of their digital transformation journey. From people-centric perspective, essential implications from the field of corporate entrepreneurship will be evidenced adding valuable insights regarding the processes that are charted out driving innovation within firms. 

The data metrics of tomorrow will define disruptive innovations as game changers having the potential for five-ten improvement in performance compared to existing products. The decisions taken will create the basis for a 30-50% reduction in costs and/or to have new-to-the-world performance features. The HR personnel will start looking at the experience of product disruptiveness encompassing new product classes, product substitutions, or fundamental product improvements. Process disruptiveness may take the form of process substitutions or process innovations which radically improve industry-specific dimensions of merit. Also, an extended form of disruptiveness in business model innovations namely disruptive business model innovations will start representing the implementation of fundamentally different business models in an existing business or segment. Tomorrow and for many such morrows to come, this could be the navigational chart or just another episode of the Simpsons! Only time will tell.