Digital Transformation is Ongoing
Note: This article is updated at Digital Transformation is Ongoing.
Digital Transformation is much broader than a technical play. It’s a chance to reimagine your customer experience, how your employees work, and how you perform operations.
It’s also a chance to continuously create and capture value in new and innovative ways, and I don’t just mean with DevOps.
Your business isn’t static. Neither is the world. Neither is the market. Neither is Digital Transformation.
Instead, Digital Transformation is a way to continuously evolve how you create and capture value in a mobile-first, cloud-first world.
In Digital Transformation Dr. Mark Baker shares how “digital” is more than just bits and bytes and there is always more Digital Transformation that can be done.
Digital Transformation is Bound by Business Decisions, Not Technical Ones
Your Digital Transformation should not be bounded by technical decisions. Your Digital Business Transformation approach should be driven by your business decisions and your business design. What matters is that the landscape is digital and that you have to design for new customer experiences, new ways of working, and new ways of performing operations in a mobile-first, cloud-first world.
“Today, when we talk of digital transformation we mean restructuring an organization to use any and all information and network-based technologies that increase its competitiveness, in a way that, over a period of time, excludes and out-competes un-transformed organizations. Of course, in a literal sense, when we walk literally about digital we mean something like expressing data as series of the digits 0 and 1 or using or storing data or information in the form of digital signals: digital TV, a digital recording or a digital computer system.
However, if we think about it that way the whole scope of our understanding and what we are thinking of achieving is quite limited and fairly technical.
In the bigger sense of digital we mean a road map that includes the full process of making a business or service so that every part is freely accessible at every level with bounds set by explicit management models, not by physical constraints. Ultimately it means that all decisions become business or usage decisions, not technical ones.”
Example of First Generation Digital Transformation
There are always some basic things you can do to get in the game of Digital Transformation. But that is just the start. Baker shares an example using a library and how they performed their Digital Transformation.
“It might be useful to give a simple example where, whose general principles apply to all digital projects. The Bodleian Libraries are a collection of approximately 40 libraries that serve the University of Oxford in England. One of the largest and most important libraries in the world, they hold 11 million printed items, 153 miles (246 kilometers) of shelving, including 3,224 bays with 95,000 shelf levels, and 600 map cabinets to hold 1.2 million maps and other items.
During the first generation of transformation I talked to senior librarians at the Bodleian, and the digital library projects that I was told of turned texts into bitmaps. Information was still effectively siloed and not electronically searchable within books, but the advantage of digital transformation at that stage was that the physical master copies were protected and copies could be sent with manually controlled access over electronic network to authorized users anywhere in the world.”
Example of Second Generation Digital Transformation
Once you go digital, more opportunities open up for further transformation. Baker continues the example of a library that undergoes Digital Transformation.
“Later more advanced approaches, like Project Guttenberg, digitized the text into ASCII format so that catalogs of books were both digital and searchable as were the individual books. Beyond that, projects like Google Books Library Project allowed the whole contents of all the books to become accessible to a single keyword search that could search all text across volumes.”
There is Always More Digital Transformation That Can Be Done
There is always more you can do and there are many stages to a full Digital Transformation.
“Of course, going digital goes beyond digitizing content and a more advanced model would determine accessibility, access and usage rights and payments, not just in the local user community but worldwide. In a project of that type any user would be able to do keyword searches across all the contents of a particular library and then usage and any payment would be determined for the specific books or documents they wanted access to, appropriate access would be granted and payment (if any) would be collected. If acquisition was performed on the same platform then requests for information, usage statistics, reader feedback and null-searches could be matched to the acquisition of new materials for the library, so as to better serve the users.
Ultimately even search goes further so that improved semantic search tools would allow search by meaning s well as by key words or phrases, as well as predictive analysis of future usage creating a proactive model, rather than a reactive model where the available content is always out of date.
At each state the instigators might have expressed the view that they had 'gone digital' and at each stage there would have been much, much more that could be done. This is, of course, just one specific instance of digital transformation related to libraries, but shows a simplified example of how there are many stages to a full transformation.”
Digital Transformation is not done when you are “transformed.”
It’s a journey of continuous evolution.
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