Opinion: Digital Transformation Projects
To achieve real digital transformation, the project pushing it forward needs to focus on delivering customer experiences over products and services. Don’t get me wrong, creating and implementing products & services is totally needed, but the way the user interacts with them should be transparent.
Customer experiences are tightly link to the utility behind the offering. To treat it as first class citizen in our digital transformation project we have to avoid following the same old process on a new technology stack. The goal is remove friction at every step of the way so customers use our offering without think in terms of products and services. Just the utility we want to deliver.
To exemplify this a little bit, let’s suppose we have to launch a digital transformation project in a department store. One of the use cases could be a customer buying a pair of pants with the following sequence of events.
“The customer enters the store, browses through pants, tries some of them on, likes one, lines up at the register, pays via a POS device and leaves the store”
A digital transformation project scope wouldn’t provide any value if we just focus on a product that adds QR payment capability at the register to pay via phone. There is still friction in the process. The customer has to line up at the register, pay there to then leave the store.
A real transformation, based on first principles design, creates a new process entirely. Like this one:
“The customer enters the store, browses throw pants, tries some of them on, likes one, scans the pant’s tag and pays it using a value store digital wallet and leaves the store”
On this new process, there is no need to rely on a POS device after lining up at the register counter. The tech to scan the jean’s tag, pay for it and leave in less that a minute is readily available on most phones. The problem is that we still think in terms of the old processes. Breaking with that mindset is a transition that takes some time.
Organizations that don’t have sunk costs in the old payment process have a higher chance of embracing a new one. This gives them a competitive advantage. The less friction the customer has and the more utility they see in the experience, the more market adoption the new process will have. Users will flock to the process that has less friction in every chance they have.
References:
- Book : Banking 4.0 (Amazon)
- Book: The Innovator’s Dilema(Amazon)
