The pillar of Successful Digital Transformations: Digitising operations

A key critical pillar of digital transformation, often tackled earlier in the digital transformation journey, is using digital for optimizing, simplifying, and rationalising existing processes. The obvious goal is to use digital tools including more advanced technologies such as AI, 5G where available and IOT to streamline business operations.

Most times this process involves rearchitecting systemz to meet the needs of the teams and the communities they serve. As an example, PayPal sent payments via email in the past and they had significant time to ensure regulatory compliance. To enable the instant payments demanded in today’s market required PayPal rearchitecting the organisation and federating or merging once separate divisions for payments and compliance into one entity. This is more than just swapping analog processes for digital ones; it is about rearchitecting the organization and the digital operations to serve customers better.

We see this with engineering managing the SCADA technologies and IT watching from a distance. Is this efficient and does it mean engineering gets a better outcome operating independently from IT?

Digitising operations is a fundamental pillar of digital transformation in the sense that, without it, your community suffers or is left behind because that full and complete rearchitect of processes is kind of stopped in its tracks. The results are seen  in silos and such we see now across organisations. However, as an organisation rearchitects their processes (taking an holistic view) they also start to unlock more transformational possibilities. That is what you want – a chance to unlock more possibilities and perhaps bring IT forward as the means to

1. Get productivity gains
2. Reduce security and other risks
3. Get visibility and perhaps reduce spending whilst increasing benefits to more parts of the council or organisation.

Because of the need to understand how the business works, digitising operations often fare better when led by the CFO or COO. However, most organisations have an executive team that acknowledges that it does require time and technology to be more efficient. The benefits, measured by the central KPIs are

1. savings in time,
2. savings in money, and
3. creating a team of people adept to solve business problems and serving the community as customers.

We have been doing this work since 2003 – getting IT into a better place on projects and ensuring secure and better governance across councils and other authorities. Be sure to call and ask to speak with one our customers. We would be glad to have them tell you how we do it better.