Digital transformation is a term that has been thrown around quite a bit in the past few years. But what does it really mean? And how can businesses achieve it?
Contino, a global transformation consultancy, in partnership with Tech London Advocates and Global Tech Advocates, published a report on the top 20 digital innovators in Europe, explaining how they transformed their organisations and what challenges they had to face along with implementing the benefits of cloud-native infrastructure.
Before assessing the tech leaders in-depth, let’s take a look at an understanding of the concept of digital transformation.
What is Digital Transformation?
When business leaders use the term "digital transformation," they refer to an organisation-wide initiative with two major components: bringing new technologies into play and implementing company culture changes.
The goal of digital transformation is for organisations to be able to keep up with market demands to stay competitive; this means keeping ahead of industry standards when it comes to speed, agility, and innovation.
To do this, companies must develop a robust technology infrastructure that can support their employees' needs and help them to achieve their overall business objectives.
When companies fail to implement a technology-focused transformation, they risk being left behind in the dust as digital competition increases and customers' expectations continue to rise.
How Can Digital Transformation Be Achieved?
Digital transformation has been achieved by some of today's most prominent industry leaders, including Amazon, Google, Netflix, and Apple.
These organisations have invested heavily not only in new technologies but also in company culture changes that allow employees from all departments or roles within an organisation - even those who were once seen as non-tech, to access these technologies with ease.
This allows for collaboration across teams and makes it easier for everyone to work more efficiently together towards shared goals.
Here are the 7 steps to achieve Digital Transformation:
- Define the problem.
- Identify what needs to be achieved.
- Design a solution.
- Implement the solution.
- Evaluate and improve on the process if necessary.
- Commit to change for better results in future endeavours.
- Repeat steps 4-6 as needed for continuous improvement.
The Digital Transformation Success of Business Leaders in Europe
Paul Whyte
Paul joined Best Food Logistics as managing director in 2017. Best Food Logistics is one of the leading food delivery services operating in London. The business had historically traded purely on price and was facing irregular deliveries (sometimes early and sometimes late), so it was losing a lot of money. When Paul joined Best, his focus was nothing but changing the culture from cutting costs to utilizing technology to transform the delivery network using big data.
As you might know, big data technology is the process of collecting data and analyzing it to mine the required information. So Paul and his team use this method to optimise deliveries and provide exceptional service to customers. This method worked really well for them.
This transformation raised the on-time deliveries from under 40% to over 95%, and customer satisfaction also increased. The improved delivery rate helped Best increase commercial rates. A food logistics company that was at loss some time ago transformed into a market-leading data aggregator through digital transformation.
Hima Mandali
Hima joined Solarisbank, a leading Banking-as-a-Service platform in Europe, as the Chief Technology Officer in July 2019. When Hima joined the organisation, his goal was to acquire more customers, but Solaris's original legacy provider had a lot of limitations.
So, Hima decided to develop a new 100% API-based platform for his organisation. He believes in his secret formula, which is KISS: Keep It Simple Solaris.
He developed an API platform that is flexible for customers to integrate their backends and frontends and scalable to reach millions of users globally. The API was so lightweight and scalable that it could serve millions of users at a time without any downtime.
Mandali believes strongly in Cloud-native computing. Therefore, as the pandemic hit, Solarisbank moved their API-based platform to Amazon Web Services, and they did it so flawlessly that there was no downtime for any customer.
Suren Siva
Suren joined Credit Suisse, a leading financial service company, as COO in 2011. Because of his capabilities of adapting to new technology and making it useful for the company, he was appointed as Director for Strategy and Innovation after five years. Building relationships with peers and cooperating to bring transformation into a broader industry conversation is a principle that he always adheres to.
After being promoted, Suren began to examine the entire value chain from the front end to the back end, identifying opportunities for improvement. He says: No matter how small the changes are, they differentiate services and allow continued development of business models.
Once he identified the opportunities, Credit Sussie partnered with Fintech Partners to implement these changes digitally. Fintech Partners automates processes, monetises data, and leverages AI and machine learning for Sussie. From a broader perspective, this transformation brought a lot of changes to the finance industry and solved a lot of common problems faced by the industry.
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