WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

We surveyed more than 3,000 CEOs around the world to learn how they are positioning their organizations for success after COVID-19. Five key factors set outperforming CEOs apart.

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it's not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it... Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. We built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that's to build.

La problématique à laquelle nous faisions face était de savoir comment améliorer l’expérience client tout en créant un moment privilégié entre les vendeurs et les clients. De ce fait, grâce au cintre connecté, le vendeur deviendra davantage un conseiller stylistique et le client pourra immédiatement consulter les tailles disponibles, le prix et essayer un vêtement qui lui sera directement amené en cabine.

To support this process we have developed a comprehensive framework that combines four clusters of enablers for digital transformation (shown in the figure below). The “4E-Framework” gives companies a structured approach to analyze and build capabilities that position their business in a rapidly changing commercial environment. In practice, this framework enables companies to focus activities and resources on key strategic areas, and to measure the results.

Think of the trends we’ve seen emerge in recent years:

• Sensors and actuators, including implantables and wearables, that let us capture more data and impressions from more objects in more places, and that affect the environment around them.
• Ubiquitous computing and hyperconnectivity, which exponentially increase the flow of data between people and devices and among devices themselves.
• Nanotechnology and nanomaterials, which let us build ever more complex devices at microscopic scale.
• Artificial intelligence, in which algorithms become increasingly capable of making decisions based on past performance and desired results.
• Vision as an interface to participate in and control augmented and virtual reality
• Blockchain technology, which makes all kinds of digital transactions secure, verifiable, and potentially automatic.

...it forces CEOs to rethink how companies execute, with new business processes, management practices, and information systems, as well as everything about the nature of customer relationships. I’m seeing leaders who get this. They’re all over it: they want to launch five transformation initiatives right now; they’re talking to me and every digital leader they know about where the technology threats are coming from; and they’re hiring the best people to advise them. Yet I’m shocked by—even fearful for—the many CEOs I know who seem to be asleep at the switch.