Empowered for tangible transformation

It’s not about painting your business with digital colors or scratching the surface of transformation. Companies need leaders who have the mission and vision to re-invent their industry, not only optimizing their enterprise with a bit of the latest tech, a bit of AI, a bit of blockchain, a bit of IoT.

And no, partnering with a large firm won’t do the trick, this needs to be done inside, nobody can do your homework for you to learn how to transform.

Yes, open innovation ecosystems with startups can help, however, watch out how to glue them together with agility and make it yours. Your transformation hero needs to have the credibility and mandate to work with the core business people within the enterprise.

Who is she/he?

• VCIO: Visionary CIO (sorry without the ‘V’ it doesn’t work)
• CDDO: Chief Digital Doing Officer (not Digital Scratching Officer)
• Head of Tech: yes, some IT people understand and work well with the business. They also have the vision but are often stuck into the pile of software projects (for which they actually need Olympe)
• Head of Products / Business Units: yes, they have product P&L to manage and it can be tough to see what’s happening outside. However, some of them step aside and understand it’s time to disrupt the HOW they make products
• Intrapreneurs: “innovation” is part of their DNA (and they may consider creating a startup if you don’t empower them to lead innovation)

Note: yes, they all have different backgrounds. Otherwise, that’d be too easy for CEOs to identify who they should empower with the transformation mandate

Empowering, to deliver value real fast:

Dear CDO and visionary CIOs, to execute your vision you need to empower teams of “Business Innovators” with the means to deliver transformation. We meet every day great people on the field in the different business units for multiple industries, many know what needs to be done. They understand the true business drivers, they are open-minded, usually tech-savvy too, they are like ‘IoT real-time sensors’ (oops… well you know what I mean :-).

If they use the same methods and platforms as always to make it happen, they will get the same hurdles of classical IT software development:

• Too late
• Not really matching the true needs
• Too expensive to adapt

And yes, unless your company is a dinosaur you are already using “agile” best practices, that’s fine. But best practices are only optimizers around innovation. At this point you need all people working on a same project using the same “language” or “platform” to create a real solution that will make an impact in the enterprise. Time to change gear!

Now, what projects should Business Innovators tackle?

There are a few categories of low-hanging fruits, whatever your industry is. Many fall under the following:

1. Open Innovation

Knowledge is right there, in the company. People know what they need for the Business to improve, trust them.

Innovation departments have selected great ideas, stop telling them the specifications aren’t clear enough or that it will take 12 months minimum to deliver.

We have great use cases for leveraging deep-tech in different industries, some strategic projects, for example, using blockchain technology in the e-government space.

2. New Interactions

It’s all about real-time collaboration. Don’t build apps based on many half-baked templates, re-invent the immersive process that fits what needs to be done, interact with a smarter environment.

We actually redefined “CX” from Customer Experience to Collaborative Experience – we don’t like customers to be alone J – check our previous article:

And some others emphasize the power of “Real-time”: https://www.cmo.com/features/articles/2019/3/11/digital-transformation-20-customer-experience-management.html#gs.bkfwan

And if you still don’t understand what this means, then check out our latest New Interactions video.

3. Industry 4.0

The promise of IoT is great, but how to get business value from the scale of decentralized real-time processing and start without months of written specification.

Link to article IoT – Hannover

Some companies are leading entire industries: https://www.msc.com/che/press/press-releases/2018-october/msc-accelerates-deployment-of-smart-containers-for

4. Supply Chains

Who doesn’t need end to end traceability?

Why is there still so many manual interventions and dark silos when solutions are just around the corner? The complexity of real-time exchanges and trust: well, time to DO, Olympe platform makes it easy, even with blockchain as a feature, as in this Oil & Gas use case.

Another good example is what the company Komgo is creating.

Can you make it a ‘Digital Factory’?

Once you have proved how fast you were able to make an impact through a first innovation use case, then it’s time to look how it can be repeated in the enterprise – don’t keep it for yourself please J.

One example is the approach of Givaudan: build a Digital Factory.

Still not sure how to make this happen? Well, ask us for a sprint with the Olympe Platform and deliver in 2 to 3 weeks the right use case to convince your board. Boom: you just got the project approved by proving the value of the use case and can then iterate from there straight up to production.

Conclusion

Dear CDOs, “soon-to-be CDOs” or “should-be-CDOs”:

It’s all about empowering Business Innovators with ambitious ideas to deliver value from day one. In three words, “Digitalizing by doing”.

At the end of the day, if you’re not a “digital-native” enterprise –and most industries aren’t-, your multinational might (unless digital empowerment is really there) probably become a small shop, more likely partnering with the tech giants. It would be too bad not to be able to call anymore your company “World leader” in x,y,z industry.

Equip your teams to digitalize faster

Please share your experience on our LinkedIn-related post.