CIS 4397 Exam 1: Chapters 1-6
What has made digital transformation possible is a set of technology innovations that enable organizations to carry out significant and meaningful business transformations. The primary distinguishing data science technologies are:
1. Big Data Analysis and Analytics 2. Machine Learning 3. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
A digital transformation involves 4 primary factors:
1. Business - take business to a new level or growth and effectiveness. - can significantly reshape and enhance many aspects of business 2. Technology - cloud computing - blockchain - IoT - Robotic Process Automation (RPA) - Big Data Analysis and Analytics - Machine Learning - AI 3. Data - leads to automated business processes that are naturally data-driven. - data becomes a prime asset that empowers the organization to develop sophisticated business automation. 4. People - will naturally augment or reshape traditional organizational structures and change the way human workers contribute and relate to the organization.
What has made digital transformation possible is a set of technology innovations that enable organizations to carry out significant and meaningful business transformations. The primary distinguishing automation technologies are:
1. Cloud Computing 2. Blockchain 3. Internet of Things (IoT) 4. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Primary organizational benefits that result from an organization's successful digital business transformation
1. Enhanced Business Alignment 2. Enhanced Automation and Productivity 3. Enhanced Data Intelligence and Decision-Making
Specific technological innovations have made digital transformation possible. The key technology drivers for digital transformation are:
1. Enhanced and Diverse Data Collection 2. Contemporary Data Science 3. Sophisticated Automation Technology 4. Autonomous Decision-Making 5. Centralized, Scalable, Resilient IT Resources 6. Immutable Data Storage 7. Ubiquitous Multiexperience Access
Strategic goals that can be attained by applying the enhancements and capabilities the organization gains from digital transformation:
1. Improved Customer Experience and Customer Confidence 2. Improved Organizational Agility 3. Improved Ability to Attain Market Growth
Key Business Drivers that lead to Digital Transformation
1. Losing Touch with Customer Communities 2. Inability to Grow in Stale Marketplace 3. Inability to Adapt to Rapidly Changing Marketplaces 4. Cold Customer Relationships 5. Inefficient Operations 6. Inefficient Decision Making
State the common risks and challenges associated with carrying out digital transformation:
1. Poor Data Quality and Data Bias - it can sometimes take a long time before inaccurate or biased data results are discovered. By that time, the organization may have already made a series of poor decisions based on flawed data intelligence. 2. Increased Quantity of Vulnerable Digital Data 3. Resistance to Digital Culture 4. Risk of Over-Automation 5. Difficult to Govern
Describe the following risk/challenge associated with carrying out digital transformation: Resistance to Digital Culture
A digital transformation aims to change and improve an organization as a whole. Such an initiative will naturally also transform the overall culture of an organization. As such, an organization's workforce may resist the introduction of digital transformation. Example: Various staff may initially resist digital transformation. it is common for there to be concerns about job loss and a move toward a culture that can appear to be "colder" and more calculating when it comes to decision-making.
Describe the following risk/challenge associated with carrying out digital transformation: Increased Quantity of Vulnerable Digital Data
A digital transformation initiative will introduce higher volumes of business data and will often encourage a greater digital presence online. This can expose significantly greater amounts of an organization's business data to the outside world. This can, consequently, increase the risks that such data is accessed and manipulated by unauthorized parties Example: The increasing quantity of data flowing into an organization can correspondingly increase the opportunities for malicious users to gain unauthorized access.
Digital Transformation Initiative
A genuine attempt to change, upgrade, and extend an organization's business models and technologies so as to enable the organization to: - gain value by significantly improving what it has been doing - gain value by introducing new things it can do (and to ensure it can do those new things really well)
Digital Transformation
A genuine attempt to take an organization's business to a new level of growth and effectiveness by transforming: - how the business relates to the outside world (in particular, how customers perceive and inter-relate with the business) - how the business operates internally (in particular, how different organizational departments may need to collaborate, and how humans and machines may need to collaborate and inter-relate with each other)
Describe the following key technological driver for digital transformation: Ubiquitous Multiexperience Access + What are the technologies relevant to this driver?
A key objective when designing customer-centric digital transformation solutions is to provide "multiexperience" support by enabling ubiquitous access to a range of business interaction options (or channels) that that the customer can choose from. Example: A customer may choose to interact with a business using any number of access methods or channels. The business is able to maintain the state of the customer interaction from one channel to the other. For example, the customer might start a transaction using a mobile app and then complete the transaction when visiting the store in person. The utilization of cloud-based environments, along with other technologies, makes it possible to support multiple access channels whereby the "state" of the customer's activity is always preserved across the different access method types. - For example, a customer may start a transaction online using a tablet, and can then (at a later point) switch to a voice-activated device to complete the transaction. Technology primarily relevant to this benefit is: - Cloud Computing
Although immutable data storage repositories are extremely secure, they are technologically quite ___ and can be challenging to ___ with other technologies.
Although immutable data storage repositories are extremely secure, they are technologically quite unique and can be challenging to integrate with other technologies.
Define Customer
An individual or an organization that purchases or acquires products.
Define Channel
An option to interact with an organization. - organizations should provide several channels for customers to interact with the organization in different ways.
Describe the following primary benefit that result from digital transformation: Enhanced Automation and Productivity
An organization undergoing a digital transformation can extend the reach and improve the quality of its automation capabilities significantly. Solutions can be built using combinations of technologies that can enable organizations to automate business tasks so as to boost operational productivity. Much of what constitutes a successful digital transformation relies on the successful attainment of this benefit.
Key Business Drivers that lead to Digital Transformation: Losing Touch with Customer Communities
Customer communities are becoming more sophisticated with online and social technology. - the overall evolution of customer communities has raised expectation levels with business vendors, while lowering their tolerance of more traditional business approaches. - this has negatively impacted many organizations that are unable to respond to or keep up with these raised expectations. Such organizations can lose market share as a result of losing touch with customer communities they previously established
During a transformation toward a customer-centric business model, the individual interactions that comprise business processes, workflows and interaction scenarios are often carefully studied and classified: Describe Customer-Facing Actions vs. Customer-Oriented Actions
Customer-Facing Actions An action or activity initiated by or resulting from direct customer interaction. - An example is when a customer interacts with an online store to place an order. Customer-Oriented Actions An action or activity associated with assisting a customer or supporting a customer relationship but that does not involve direct interaction. - An example is when a customer orders a product that is not in stock, and behind-the-scenes steps are taken to process a backorder for the customer
Describe how you would mitigate the following risk/challenge associated with carrying out digital transformation: Increased Quantity of Vulnerable Digital Data
Cybersecurity technologies and practices provide increased protection for organizations with a large online presence. Some cybersecurity systems utilize data science technologies to more effectively profile attackers and counter malicious activity.
Data intelligence can be used to improve ___ and increase opportunities to ___ manual tasks previously carried out by human workers.
Data intelligence can be used to improve automation and increase opportunities to automate manual tasks previously carried out by human workers.
Data Intelligence
Data that is of value to the organization and is relevant and meaningful to the organization's business. - data intelligence is extracted from data, meaning that a quantity of data is processed and filtered to generate a subset of data that provides intelligence (useful information) to the organization and its business. - much of digital transformation is focused on the creation and utilization of data intelligence.
Digital Transformation Initiatives are more prone to failure when the potential impact on ___ in organizations is overlooked or not properly considered during planning stages.
Digital Transformation Initiatives are more prone to failure when the potential impact on people in organizations is overlooked or not properly considered during planning stages.
To proceed with digital transformation, the organization will need to develop:
Digital Transformation Solutions - essentially applications responsible for automating and/or contributing data intelligence, each of which may encompass one or more related business tasks. - an organization will typically end up building multiple digital transformation solutions that share resources
How Digital Transformation can solve the problem: Losing Touch with Customer Communities
Digital transformation can enable organizations to recognize and respond to customer community trends. - Digital transformation platforms and solutions are typically designed to be customer-centric from the ground up, allowing businesses to gain competitive advantages by improving their online presence to continue to meet and exceed customer expectations.
How Digital Transformation can solve the problem: Inability to Adapt to Rapidly Changing Marketplaces
Digital transformation can intrinsically improve an organization's ability to act more responsively to unforeseen change, such as rapid developments in business marketplaces. - Digital transformation especially supports aggressive innovation, such as to enable organizations to introduce new, disruptive products and services into a marketplace
After applying benefits from digital transformation, such as: - enhanced business alignment - enhanced automation and productivity - enhanced data intelligence/decision-making strategic goals may be attained. Describe the following strategic goal: Improved Organizational Agility
Digital transformation can transform an organization to become more agile in its ability to: - Adapt to unforeseen business changes, internal changes, and regulatory changes - Swiftly introduce new products or services into a market so as to maximize its ability to disrupt an existing marketplace before competitors can adapt and respond - Refine and adjust its business processes and models in response to new data intelligence Example: Over the course of a year, a business selling food products is required to adapt to a series of regulatory changes that impact some of its products. The improved alignment of its underlying automation systems allows the organization to more efficiently adjust its operations to accommodate such unforeseen changes.
Digital transformation leads to ___ business processes that are naturally ___.
Digital transformation leads to automated business processes that are naturally data-driven.
Describe how you would mitigate the following risk/challenge associated with carrying out digital transformation: Poor Data Quality and Data Bias
Ensure that data scientists working with the data have the necessary skills and proficiency to identify and filter out "bad" data. Sound quality assurance practices are also necessary.
Key Business Drivers that lead to Digital Transformation: Inefficient Decision-Making
Even for organizations that already have significant automation solutions powering their day-to-day operations, they traditionally continue to rely upon key personnel to make the majority of operational decisions. Many repetitive decisions made by humans are based on simple decision-making criteria. Other decisions made by humans are based on decision-making criteria too complex for a human to process efficiently. - In either case, the involvement of a human decision maker can lead to unnecessarily inefficient operations In Image: The rate at which reporting data is provided to decision makers and the time it takes humans to make decisions can be insufficiently slow to keep up with market demands.
Key Business Drivers that lead to Digital Transformation: Inability to Grow in Stale Marketplaces
For years, several marketplaces did not change because businesses established themselves as the primary suppliers in those markets and, from a customer's perspective, there was little to distinguish one from the other. - this has stalled the growth of some organizations while completely inhibiting the growth of others. - the customer sees little difference between what the online vendors have to offer.
Describe the following risk/challenge associated with carrying out digital transformation: Difficult to Govern
Governance is a key success factor in many IT initiatives to ensure that the introduction of new and improved technologies achieves an organization's tactical and strategic goals. However, the potential governance scope of a digital transformation effort can be unpredictable and daunting and will go well beyond IT. Digital transformation can introduce several far-reaching impacts to both business and IT that need to be tracked, assessed and regulated in order for the initiative to proceed and evolve successfully over time. A governance team comprised of both business and IT professionals needs to be given the responsibility of overseeing and regulating a digital transformation initiative. - This team may require significant resources and training to be fully prepared to govern different life cycle stages of many inter-related projects Example: A governance group comprised of business and technology professionals is responsible for the governance of an organization's digital transformation. This team may be challenged to stay on top of the many governance processes and precepts that may be established, created and coordinated.
Key Business Drivers that lead to Digital Transformation: Inability to Adapt to Rapidly Changing Marketplaces
In more volatile marketplaces, change is a constant factor. Vendors may aggressively introduce new, unique products or services or impose new promotions that are difficult to compete with. - Organizations in such business climates can find themselves outmatched, especially when their competitors are larger and wealthier. - Other factors that can introduce rapid change into marketplaces can be political or regulatory influences that can affect international trading or currencies. These too can lead to volatile marketplaces. - As international communities become more connected and responsive, corresponding marketplaces may be subject to greater and more rapid change. Organizations without the ability to adapt to such changes can find themselves left behind
Describe the following key technological driver for digital transformation: Sophisticated Automation Technology + What are the technologies relevant to this driver?
Manual tasks that have traditionally not been easily automated can now be fully automated. Special software programs called "bots" can be configured to carry out a range of hands-on processing tasks, such as data entry and information routing The behavior and functionality of bots can be further enhanced through the use of data science technologies. Example: A software program known as a "bot" is given the responsibility to complete order processing-related tasks that were previously carried out by humans. Technology primarily relevant to this benefit is: - Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Describe the following key technological driver for digital transformation: Autonomous Decision-Making + What are the technologies relevant to this driver?
Modern digital transformation solutions can incorporate data science technologies that can assume decision-making responsibilities. This enables the solution to rapidly respond to a range of situations that may have previously required more time for correct human decisions to be carried out. Example: A digital transformation solution dynamically determines the route a delivery truck should take to visit the warehouses where deliveries are to be transported. The system takes into account current traffic data and current customer request data. Technology primarily relevant to this benefit is: - Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Key Business Drivers that lead to Digital Transformation: Cold Customer Relationships
On a fundamental level, many organizations establish relatively impersonal relationships with their customers. - Customer dissatisfaction has remained common in every industry for decades. - Many private and public organizations have recognized that there is much benefit to building "warm," long-lasting relationships with their client communities. - Traditional ways in which businesses interact with customers can be relatively "cold" in that little or no effort is made to improve the customer experience
After applying benefits from digital transformation, such as: - enhanced business alignment - enhanced automation and productivity - enhanced data intelligence/decision-making strategic goals may be attained. Describe the following strategic goal: Improved Customer Experience and Customer Confidence
One of the foundational objectives of digital transformation is to foster a shift toward establishing a customer-centric culture, resulting in improved relationships with customers, attracting new customers and supporting all of this via enhanced automation. Customer-centric solutions have the potential of capturing the interest and enhancing the satisfaction and confidence of customers. Digital transformation solutions aim to achieve these improvements by being designed, from the ground up, with customer-centricity in mind.
Describe Product-Centric Relationship vs. Customer-Centric Relationship
Product-Centric Relationship The emphasis is placed on the quality of the product it offers. - the assumption here is that the greater the value (or perceived value) of a product, the greater the satisfaction of the customer acquiring the product. - the product is the primary business entity around which many parts of the organization are built and structured - when there are multiple products offered by an organization, it can lead to silo-based organizational structures that become fragmented over time as each silo carries on its own lifecycle and direction. Customer-Centric Relationship Positions the customer as the primary business entity and then positions other parts of the organization with the goal of maximizing successful interactions and transactions with its customers. - to achieve this goal, many of the previously silo-based organizational departments are required to collaborate. Example: A classic example is a product-centric bank that has organizational silos for its current product portfolio, which may include savings accounts, mortgages, insurance and investments. This product-centric business model leads to customers having to interact individually with the bank when inquiring about or acquiring each product. A customer acquiring all four products may, resultantly, end up having to create and manage four separate customer accounts. A subsequent maintenance task, such as updating an address or phone number, may have to be repeated four times. - This approach predictably leads to a sub-optimal customer experience When fostering relationship-centric customer engagements, the customer experience does not end after the purchase of a new product. Instead, that is often the starting point of what the organization hopes is to become a genuine relationship with the customer and a relationship that is not limited to the customer's interest in a given product - After the organization becomes customer-centric, the silos are removed and the business processes consolidated to provide a single interaction experience during which the customer can learn about and purchase any products of interest, and during which the customer is motivated to return on a regular basis.
Public cloud providers typically offer ___ pricing so that you only pay for your actual usage of their IT resources.
Public cloud providers typically offer "pay-as-you-go" pricing so that you only pay for your actual usage of their IT resources.
Describe how you would mitigate the following risk/challenge associated with carrying out digital transformation: Resistance to Digital Culture
Quality leadership can provide pre-emptive efforts, along with new organizational models, to help mitigate resistance and help foster greater support for digital transformation. Management can ensure that the organization is transformed with the most positive outcomes, for both the business and the human workers. A communications campaign is often one of the first steps to beginning a digital transformation. The sooner awareness is raised and concerns are addressed, the sooner a healthy digital culture can begin taking shape.
Describe the following risk/challenge associated with carrying out digital transformation: Risk of Over-Automation
The digital transformation market offers a variety of new opportunities to introduce automation into business operations. However, there are often reasons as to why some automation options may simply not be suitable, either now or in the future: - many automation opportunities are driven by the availability of analytical data. The quality or maturity of the data itself may not yet be sufficient to warrant replacing manual tasks with automation. - the organization itself may not have reached a sufficient level of maturity to establish some forms of automation on a broader scale. - the quality of existing business processes do not meet adequate standards. Automating poor business processes does not address their shortcomings and can even reduce motivation to fix their problems once new automation is in place. Example: A legacy accounting system that previously relied on the manual processing of paper business documents is replaced with a fully automated digital transformation solution. However, the resulting reporting produced is not valuable because the solution was unable to replicate the quality of the human data entry. A better solution may have been to still digitize the paper business documents while retaining the involvement of the human resources.
How Digital Transformation can solve the problem: Inability to Grow in Stale Marketplaces
The enhanced data intelligence used in digital transformation solutions and the manner in which such solutions are designed with the primary goals of improving customer experience. Furthermore, introducing new innovations can help organizations break away from (or break into) a stale marketplace to noticeably distinguish themselves from competitors.
Define Customer Data Intelligence
The extensive collection, processing, and analysis of customer-related data. - digital transformation solutions use Customer Data Intelligence to enable and realize customer-centricity. Customer-centric data collected over time helps organizations build profiles of customers by analyzing the accumulated data to derive statistical profiles. This type of profile information can be fed into the online solution in real-time to enable it to continually enhance interactions during the next customer visit by customizing its relationship-value actions to the customer profiles. Example: There is a 78% probability the customer will purchase Products A and B during this visit. Based on the customer's past preferences, there is a 57% probability the customer will be interested in this new Product C. Let's offer the customer a promotion whereby Product C is offered at a 20% discount when purchased together with Products A and B
Describe how you would mitigate the following risk/challenge associated with carrying out digital transformation: Risk of Over-Automation
The introduction of automation needs to be carefully planned and phased in.
The more ___ an organization has, the more opportunities it opens up for customers to connect and remain connected.
The more channels an organization has, the more opportunities it opens up for customers to connect and remain connected.
After applying benefits from digital transformation, such as: - enhanced business alignment - enhanced automation and productivity - enhanced data intelligence/decision-making strategic goals may be attained. Describe the following strategic goal: Improved Ability to Attain Market Growth
Digital transformation platforms enable an organization to make significant enhancements in how its business currently operates and, often more importantly, to introduce new products and services to disrupt existing markets in pursuit of growth. This can lead to several avenues for increasing market share and revenue: - being able to reach a wider range of customers - being able to reach new customers by adding new products and services - being able to increase the frequency of existing and new customers returning by improving customer experience Furthermore, the technologies associated with digital transformation provide many opportunities for underlying automation solutions to become highly optimized: - optimizing business workflows by improving the quality of automation technology - carrying out tasks faster and with less overhead by replacing manual labor with automation logic - continually improving and refining business operations in response to new digital data intelligence that is collected Example: Organization A aims to increase its market share by 3% as a result of a successful digital transformation whereby it plans to improve existing services and products and introduce new services and products into the marketplace.
Describe the following key technological driver for digital transformation: Enhanced and Diverse Data Collection + What are the technologies relevant to this driver?
Digital transformation platforms encompass technology innovations capable of collecting an extremely broad range of diverse data. By having such a wide range of data as input, digital transformation platforms can: - offer human decision makers deeply insightful data intelligence to help improve their decision-making capabilities and to further help them discover how new product and service innovations could be introduced - perform highly sophisticated and intelligent forms of automation that can improve both the quality and efficiency of how business is automated. Example: A digital transformation solution may access and utilize data that was collected from a wide variety of sources. This enables the solution to perform its functions more effectively and to further improve how it performs its functions over time Technologies relevant to this driver include: - Big Data Analysis and Analytics - Internet of Things (IoT) - Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
How Digital Transformation can solve the problem: Inefficient Decision-Making
Digital transformation platforms introduce a sophisticated level of data intelligence, as well as data-driven systems that can use this data intelligence to automate a range of decisions that have customarily been carried out by humans.
How Digital Transformation can solve the problem: Cold Customer Relationships
Digital transformation provides a genuine opportunity for an organization to dramatically improve customer satisfaction for the purposes of building longer term relationships with existing customers and attracting new customers.
Describe the following risk/challenge associated with carrying out digital transformation: Poor Data Quality and Data Bias
Digital transformation solutions are heavily data-driven. The data intelligence utilized and produced by these solutions ends up influencing or even determining the outcome of key business decisions. A constant, overarching concern associated with digital transformation is the completeness, accuracy and orientation of the data used to produce data intelligence. If the quality of the data is poor or sub-par, it can lead to misleading analysis results or missed opportunities to discover new insights. Another related concern is data bias, whereby some factors within the data are more heavily weighted than others, leading to skewed results and analytical errors. Example: Low-quality data and data bias can creep into almost any type of data collected by an organization. If undetected, it can make its way into a range of internal corporate repositories where it can influence data intelligence used as input for both manual and automated decision-making.
Describe the following primary benefit that result from digital transformation: Enhanced Data Intelligence and Decision-Making
Digital transformation solutions can accumulate valuable data intelligence, enabling them to produce deeply insightful analysis results in real-time or near-real-time. This can significantly empower organizations with new insights, new ideas and more decisive and successful decision-making capabilities. Example: Traditional legacy systems produce various independent reports for human decision makers. Digital transformation solutions process and consolidate input data from a range of sources with the aim of producing enhanced reports at a faster rate and with greater data intelligence. The reported data may be provided to human decision makers or to data science systems that can make and act upon decisions autonomously.
How Digital Transformation can solve the problem: Inefficient Operations
Digital transformation solutions can introduce technologies that can more easily and effectively automate tasks that have been commonly carried out manually.
Describe the following key technological driver for digital transformation: Centralized, Scalable, Resilient IT Resources + What are the technologies relevant to this driver?
Digital transformation solutions commonly have distinct performance requirements, such as: - high scalability to accommodate large quantities of concurrent users. - dynamic scalability to accommodate unpredictable usage fluctuations. - high resiliency to recover from failure with minimal disruptions in service - high compute power to process large quantities of data - centralized IT resources that can be shared by multiple solutions Cloud-based environments can provide the necessary infrastructure to support these and other digital transformation solution performance requirements. Example: An organization can centralize IT resources into a private cloud that it owns and operates internally. It can further opt to balance or "burst-out" to additional IT resources residing in a public cloud, when necessary. Technology primarily relevant to this benefit is: - Cloud Computing
Define Intelligent Automation Solutions
Digital transformation solutions that combine bots with data science technologies.
When designing new solutions or transforming the transaction-value steps of existing solutions to relationship-value steps, there is often a need to carefully assess and determine the appropriate level of warmth to be provided in each relationship-value action. Define Relationship Warmth + Define Warmth in Communication + Define Warmth in Proactive Accommodation + Define Warmth in Customer Rewards + Define Warmth in Exceeding Customer Expectations
Relationship Warmth The extent of friendliness and accommodation a solution and/or human workers can exhibit and express to the customer. Warmth in Communication The tone and language of communication used with customers is often, by default, formal, polite and concise Warmth in Proactive Accommodation There are sometimes opportunities to introduce proactive warmth in customer-facing and customer-oriented actions. - This type of warmth often requires that the solution or the human worker be creative in how they are proactive. - e.g. when there is an unavoidable one-day delay in shipping a product, instead of notifying the customer the delivery will be late, the employee proactively uses a faster shipping method. This will cost the company more, but will be more likely to maintain a long-lasting customer relationship. Warmth in Customer Rewards Awarding gifts and other types of rewards in recognition of customer value or loyalty. Warmth in Exceeding Customer Expectations Going above and beyond customer expectations. - e.g. adding additional services at no charge, for example. - this can provoke even stronger positive emotions than receiving periodic rewards, as it can more clearly express a sense of genuine appreciation.
Describe Single-Channel vs. Multi-Channel vs. Omni-Channel Customer Interactions Define Multiexperience approach
Single-channel When a business offers only one interaction option to the customer. - e.g. a customer can only order a product online - the problem with single-channel businesses is that they do not offer many points of interaction for the customer Multi-channel When a business offers more than one interaction option to the customer. - e.g. a customer can order a product online, through a phone call, or from the physical store. - the problem with multi-channel interactions is that the customer experience with each channel is usually completely independent Omni-channel Digital transformation advocates an omni-channel approach, where customer interactions across multiple channels are kept in synch. Multiexperience approach Customers have a wide range of access methods made available to them. - you have multiple channels (online chat, email, in-person visits, phone communication, etc.) and you can use multiple devices/mediums (laptops/desktops, smartphones/tablets, smart watches, etc.)
Some organizations have traditionally been too focused on improving ___, as opposed to improving how they relate to the ___ that consume those products.
Some organizations have traditionally been too focused on improving products, as opposed to improving how they relate to the customers that consume those products.
Define Product
Something that is produced, most commonly with the intention of selling it for revenue or providing it in exchange for something else of value. A product can be a physical item or it can be non-physical, such as the delivery of a service
Describe the following key technological driver for digital transformation: Contemporary Data Science + What are the technologies relevant to this driver?
The ability to collect large quantities of data is only of benefit if the data can be correctly processed, filtered and analyzed to be of relevance and value to the organization and its automation solutions. For example, data science technologies can be used to: - consolidate, process, and filter large volumes of diverse data so as to produce meaningful and relevant analysis results. - process and learn from a constant stream of input data so as to produce increasingly sophisticated analysis results. - enable solutions to carry out autonomous decision-making Example: Medical records provided by hospitals and medical centers are used by physicians to help identify patterns that assist in diagnosing patients with similar conditions or predicting the likelihood of such conditions developing. Technologies relevant to this driver include: - Big Data Analysis and Analytics - Machine Learning - Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The actual benefits of rethinking and combining business processes will relate directly to the ___ of the newly designed business process. The goal is to consolidate and streamline, but there is always the danger of a new workflow becoming overly ___.
The actual benefits of rethinking and combining business processes will relate directly to the quality of the newly designed business process. The goal is to consolidate and streamline, but there is always the danger of a new workflow becoming overly complex or convoluted.
Define Customer Journey + how does it relate to digital transformation?
The collection and sequence of steps and actions a customer carries out when interacting with an organization, a product or a service, in order to achieve a goal. Customer journeys can vary in length, scope and complexity. A given customer journey typically spans more than one customer interaction Customer journeys beyond a single transaction are often considered relationship-building customer journeys. A primary objective of digital transformation initiatives is to make customer journeys as customer-centric as possible so that the nature of the relationship-building that occurs leads to positive, recurring customer journeys.
Describe the following primary benefit that result from digital transformation: Enhanced Business Alignment
Traditionally, organizations were often structured around business silos based on specific products, services or lines of business. A digital transformation can introduce the need for: - previously isolated or separated business departments to collaborate in support of common business goals. - previously separated business and IT departments to collaborate more closely in support of common business goals - single-purpose business processes previously focused on specific products to be consolidated with others in support of new business goals A common goal of digital transformation initiatives is to eliminate product "silos" so as to establish an environment that fosters collaboration and alignment across departments. Example: to improve customer-centricity, those groups or departments originally responsible for business analysis as it pertained to individual products, now work together to provide a consolidated customer experience through which all products (and new products) can be explored. Example: Customer A wants to obtain three different products from Organization A. Previously, Customer A had to interact with Organization A via three separate workflows and systems, which may have even required the creation of three individual accounts. A transition toward a customer-centric solution results in a consolidated customer experience enabling Customer A to carry out transactions in relation to the three products in a single environment. Customer A is further able to discover new products while in the consolidated environment. This type of business alignment can strengthen an organization culturally, but primarily benefits the organization by establishing a solid foundation upon which automation and data science technology enhancements can be applied
During a transformation toward a customer-centric business model, the individual interactions that comprise business processes, workflows and interaction scenarios are often carefully studied and classified: Describe Transaction-Value Actions vs. Relationship-Value Actions
Transaction-Value Action A short-term result from an interaction with a "one-off" activity that is not primarily geared toward making the customer return. Relationship-Value Action A long-term result from an interaction that is intentionally geared toward making the customer return. Note that although organizations should strive in making many of their interactions with customers relationship-value based, not all customer interactions need to be relationship-value based
Key Business Drivers that lead to Digital Transformation: Inefficient Operations
While most organizations already utilize business automation technology to automate various parts of their operations, the extent of automation is often limited to those tasks that are obvious automation candidates and for which the development of automation systems is relatively straight-forward. - Many menial steps in modern operational workflows therefore remain dependent on human involvement, which can result in on-going performance limitations. In image: Although the collection and recording of customer orders are automated, the subsequent processing and order fulfillment assignment tasks continue to be carried out manually.
With regards to customers, many organizations have traditionally focused on ___, instead of ___.
With regards to customers, many organizations have traditionally focused on the delivery of products to customers, instead of establishing a focus on the customers themselves. Digital transformation advocates a foundational shift in an organization's business models to transform away from product-orientation (transaction-based customer interactions) and to transform toward customer-orientation (relationship-based customer engagement).
Describe the following key technological driver for digital transformation: Immutable Data Storage + What are the technologies relevant to this driver?
With the increase in the quantity of digital data being collected, there is a greater need for sensitive and important data to be permanently stored in such a manner that it can never be altered or manipulated. Highly secure storage technology that emerged from the use of cryptocurrencies has made it possible to position immutable repositories alongside corporate databases, as part of digital transformation solutions. Example: A digital transformation solution submits important business records to a repository capable of immutable storage. Technology primarily relevant to this benefit is: - Blockchain
