The Sunday News
Mugove Hamadziripi
TWO years into the Covid-19 pandemic, digital transformation initiatives are continuing to affect businesses of all sizes, speed is becoming the new currency to unlock value.
The pandemic caught most companies unaware, resulting in some embarking on an impromptu crash course in digitalisation.
Leadership teams want the ability to exploit emerging business opportunities at a competitive speed and bring differentiating solutions from concept to market at the pace of the customer.
Across the world, digital transformation is expanding among all industry sectors but its rate of growth has not been consistent, especially in Zimbabwe. The pace of technology change is escalating steadily and explosively, with new technologies being brought out more rapidly each year.
Local companies need to make choices over whether to invest in new technologies that didn’t exist before the Covid-19.
As technology can make its way from notion to popular application ever faster, it’s necessary to consider how digital transformation advisory services can help businesses respond to an array of choices.
By adopting an accelerated digital transformation, it’s a golden opportunity to help companies proactively embed stakeholder interests and sustainability into their digital growth and business transformations.
In the case of Zimbabwe, not much progress has been made with regards to digitalisation. Zimbabwe, just like most Global South countries, boasts of poor hardware and infrastructure. In the process, most Zimbabwean companies are confronted by the rhetoric question of how to integrate fragmented (and often makeshift digitalisation efforts) in a way that’s sustainable as we all work on outmanoeuvring the pandemic.
Any digitalisation effort or initiative, whether the goal is to safeguard business continuity or enable digital innovations, one of the key questions for the organisation’s leadership remains: Are there ways to accelerate digitalisation and make outcomes more predictable? This is principally relevant for small and medium-sized companies that need to be more targeted in their efforts and may not have the resources to engage in the “fail fast” approach often heralded by the larger poster children of the digitalisation movement.
IBM (2021) defines “fail fast” as a philosophy that takes an iterative, hypothesis-driven approach to developing and launching new ideas. It is heavily related to the concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and is premised on getting early feedback that can either validate or invalidate an idea.
Local Leadership teams want the ability to exploit emerging business opportunities at a competitive speed and bring differentiating solutions from concept to market at the pace of the customer.
Too often, most companies undertake an ambitious digital transformation roadmap that can take years and eat up valuable resources . . . but are not able to realise value at scale, which is a key component of these initiatives that run the gamut.
Fortunately, in looking at the starting point, there are ways Zimbabwean companies or businesses to work faster, smarter, and more strategically.
Firstly, there is a need to Reflect on Today’s Problems birthed out of Covid-19 and other factors with an Eye Towards the Future.
Healthy businesses are expected to take treat digital transformation as a continuous and dynamic process. For true and measurable digital transformation, it is not enough to solve an expensive one-time challenge that ages too quickly.
The approach should allow the necessary work of building the strategic and technological frameworks for capturing sustainable impact at scale.
Ideally, frameworks and features can be built out simultaneously so operations continue running smoothly in the present with few interruptions, and the entire system is preparing for the future. In this way, digital transformation can continue to serve the needs of the company while being mindful and realistic for current business.
Secondly, Zimbabwean companies are expected to use automation to become more agile and resilient. The value of integrating automation cannot be overstated. However, a number of businesses are hesitant to invest the time upfront in developing these tools.
They worry that this part of the process will actually slow down their teams and delay projects, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
If your business values people as your most valuable resource, automation directly allow you to focus on higher-value results like driving innovation rather than getting caught up in low-value activities like repetitive and time-consuming administrative tasks.
Your best people can be tackling your most pressing and important challenges with bigger positive payoffs.
There is also need to define your mission and become its biggest advocate. When speed is paramount, teams can’t work in isolation.
Your business continuously relies on open communication and co-operation among several departments or sections in the company. Without a clear vision of specific goals, it can be hard to get everyone on board with this new business model.
Once a vision and plan are in place, company leadership has to become its biggest proponent. Key decision-makers should be leading digital strategies, energising the troops, and getting everyone on the same page.
If the leadership isn’t excited about the prospect of a full digital transformation, employee support will be half-hearted and eventually simply wear out. This is especially important in the wake of a pandemic that has left many people feeling drained both in and out of the workplace.
We all agree that today’s consumers are savvier and more sophisticated than yester years. The consumers expect high-quality products, fast and effective services, and superior customer service. With increasingly competitive markets, if they don’t get what they want, chances are high there is another company out there with more to offer.
At this juncture, companies are expected to invest in the technology and tools needed to better understand their customers and address specific pain points to shift business towards a model of total customer engagement and satisfaction.
One of the biggest shifts that businesses can expect to see in the coming years is a move towards personalised services, 360-degree view of the customer, contextual recommendations, and other features.
Next, companies should demonstrate tangible business value with data. The critical enabling factor is the ability to collect, process, and gain business insights from all kinds of data from multiple sources (or domains) in helping cross-functional, agile teams move fast at a global scale.
Trusted, clean data allow companies to test and generate rapid results to fund the transformation and build momentum.
Covid-19 has taught us that businesses are no longer limited by the confines of four physical walls in a single building. Data and technology tools provide the opportunity to connect across all sorts of boundaries and operate on a larger scale without taking on traditional costs, like labour or additional cooled rooms of hardware.
As companies put together digital transformation roadmaps, speed and momentum should be at the heart of any successful plan. A robust technology platform is helpful, but the human element must be taken into consideration at whatever cost.
With digital transformation initiatives, time-to-value is a critical component. With multiple use cases, local companies are encouraged to start small by narrowing the focus on the highest-value initial pilot use-case that can be solved quickly. To achieve significant business value, plan for simultaneous rollouts of impact-creating technology to achieve payoffs in an accelerated timeframe.
l Mugove Hamadziripi writes about/consults on Development, Media, Urbanism, ERP, Communications, Community, Policy/Politics, Sustainability and the Environment. He consults with the Centre for Impact Evaluation and Research Design and Erongo Consulting Group. He can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected], Twitter: @mhamadziripi.
