WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Additional insights into the trends.

To download the actual slides, go here:

KPCB Internet trends 2014 via @KPCB http://sco.lt/621suH

I have not seen the 60minutes report but this post raises an important question for anyone interested in digital transformation: how to future-proof your solutions?

It is of great importance. Will my data be readable 40 years from now? If so how? Will cloud computing and SaaS provide a solution, migrating and evolving the data over time as the application changes.

I love to read these weekly interviews. More often than not they are about products and companies that I did not know existed but that I found super interesting. I can't read them fast enough but thought I'd share anyways.

BTW, I discovered shoplocket by accident. They provide a very unique eCommerce platform where you can sell few products - just one or two will do! It addresses a real need for startups and entrepreneurs. They are also under utilized because their platform can be used to test a new idea, a new product, a new eCommerce offering, even for large retailers or brands. Oh well...

This is great for my kids, who will join the workforce in the next 10 years: there will be plenty of job offers for them. From a digital transformation standpoint this represents both a challenge and tremendous opportunity for businesses to digitize as they will not be ale to find talent to replace all the boomers that leave. Digital will provide a way to remain competitive with a smaller workforce. This is a well known trend, has been for years, yet few of us include it in our planning.

Will report back after the March 12 webinar.

A great summary of this year's Customer Experience Index By Forrester. It helps assess how good you are at keeping your customers happy.

The BestBuy omni-channel strategy document was made public in Nov 2012 and is available online. Sheds light into the company current state versus competitors and the strategy to regain its position.

The report provides a comprehensive 14 elements framework to guide the collaboration required to make corporations more cyber-resilient. In our world of 100M credit card stolen at Target and large-scale NSA spying activities, McKinsey suggests that this now become a priority on the CEO agenda.

I argue when looking at the framework that many of the Enterprise Architecture tools and practices can be leveraged successfully to implement the framework. Moreover, as digital transformations become common place, the security aspects must be integrated from the get-go.

Retailers have been doing forecasting for a long time, predicting from previous sales and market conditions (and their best judgement), what to order for each one of their stores. When you have hundreds of stores, this is not a simple tasks, and it often requires years of experience - if you want to do it well. Because forecasting errors are very costly, resulting in lost sales or products that stay on shelves or racks and must be transferred to others stores, or worse, discounted at the end of the season.

I've worked on systems - from simple excel spreadsheets to more complex applications - that automate the predictive aspect and provide tools to facilitate the forecasting process. But never were the tools using invidual client profiles  to make the prediction. They always used global store-level or regional sales numbers. 

So, at least in theory, established retailers can have a leg up.

But Amazon may (again) shock retailers into a digital transformation, bringing their individual client sales data into account when doing the forecast. This will require retailers to include individual customer transactions and possibly their "wish lists" and online search information, to include in your forecasts. Data is there but few reatilers have the systems or the integration to bring this data in a timely manner to the "forecasting team" desk.

Amazon has been doing this with "replesnishment" options where they send you products on a regular schedule, so you don't have to "shop" for them: they come at your door at a predefined interval you control. And they give you rebates for sticking to your schedude (predictability is invaluable in a supply chain!).

If you do, then your forecast will undeniably be better. If you don't companies like amazon, with lower overhead, will send your clients products before they even consider going to store to see what's on the shelves!

still relevant insight in 2014.

The article conclusions are very important to consider in all change management activities of a digital transformation. We must ensure that resources are comfortable with a new way to do things that may require skills they do not possess and that may clash with the way they have been brought to consider "knowledge work".

Any new system should be built from the ground up to support data being open - with proper controls as in the case of the consumer insight example given in the paper.