The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Why ‘Big Bang’ change has no place in digital transformation

By Avinash Rao | global head

Wipro Digital

|

The Drum Network article

This content is produced by The Drum Network, a paid-for membership club for CEOs and their agencies who want to share their expertise and grow their business.

Find out more

March 17, 2015 | 4 min read

Last September, Rakuten Bank in Japan launched ‘Transfer by Facebook’ – the first money transfer using Facebook. A few weeks later, in October, French bank Groupe BPCE launched a cash transfer service via Twitter.

Wipro Digital's global head Avinash Rao.

The bank’s mobile application allows French bank account holders to transfer a limited amount of money using Twitter without revealing account or bank branch details to the recipient. Banks that have traditionally operated from behind rock-solid walls of privacy and security are, like their customers, going digital. At the same time, new non-bank entrants such as Venmo and Apple Pay, are challenging their core business.

Digital evolution is giving rise to remarkable new ways of organizing businesses and addressing customers. The relevance of Facebook, the simplicity of Uber, the omnipresence of Google and others have set new expectations and standards for experience in a digital age.

In turn, businesses are busy trying to re-imagine their products, services, operations and business models from their customers’ perspective.

The buzz is around ‘Digital Transformation’ – only, organizations may take months, if not years, to figure out what they should be doing and how they should go about it. And while they ponder over their Digital Transformation roadmap, the customer’s lifestyle will have evolved even further.

It is therefore necessary to understand that Digital Transformation is a larger journey, unique to each business. It goes beyond enabling individual customer touch points such as websites, mobile devices and social platforms. A Digital Transformation agenda works at the intersection of the front-end customer experience and the back-end digitization of the business itself

For many organizations it also implies replacing large hierarchical structures with structures that are more customer centric in shape, digital in form and agile in behaviour.

Best practice? Forget about it

While customers are the reason for embarking on this digital journey, enterprise IT, marketing, operations and other departments are the ones who need to make it happen. This requires change: moving from well-established and fixed processes to adaptive, iterative and agile ones.

At the core of this approach is the ability to do what appears, at first glance, against the grain of popular level-headed thinking: ignore best practices and big strategy.

Instead, businesses must leverage micro-strategy that immediately delivers incremental change relevant to it. The idea is to implement and evaluate ideas quickly, in an iterative manner, throwing in design innovation, enabling technology and optimizing customer journeys as you go along. This means creating a highly adaptive and agile environment that is accustomed to ambiguity and which also supports multi-disciplinary teams.

Such an environment means working with engineers, customers, social anthropologists, data scientists, user interaction specialists, regulatory experts, digital strategists, client IT and business teams.

In effect, such a team that depends on real-time customer-relevant research and collaboration serves as a replacement for best practices. It has the powerful ability to re-imagine products, service and process design to deliver value back to the customer.

Is this a risk-free approach? Not really. It takes vision, courage and a willingness to do things differently. Legacy systems, ageold organization models and yes, people, will likely challenge a new approach that requires broad-based change and new thinking.

However, because it is an iterative process devoid of ‘Big Bang’ change, the risk is less, controlled and manageable. What’s more, as the process is structured around customer needs and something we call “Customer Journey Engineering”, it lends itself to rapid and successful marketplace adoption.

Avinash Rao is the global head of Wipro Digital.

Content by The Drum Network member:

Wipro Digital

Wipro Digital collaborates with clients to deliver customer-centered digital transformation.  Working at the intersection of strategy, design and technology, we derive insight, shape interaction, drive integration and unlock innovation for our clients. Drawing on 150,000 employees across Wipro, we engineer extraordinary experiences for global brands, businesses and their customers at scale.

Find out more

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +