May 13, 2019

Jay Dettling serves as Vice President of Adobe’s global Partner and Alliances program, joining with Partners to navigate Digital Transformation and drive customer success. Jay spent over 23 years in partner organizations, including Accenture and Acquity Group, and he brings that experience to Adobe as the Voice of the Partner. We’re working on getting more articles from this author! We’re working on getting more articles from this author! Adobe's Jay Dettling, VP of Global Partners & Alliances Program, discusses how the customer journey begins with employees, as well as how data will fuel that transformation. Digital transformation has become the defining challenge for business in the past decade. Put simply, it’s the process by which companies leverage digital technologies in everything they do—from product to sales to operations and marketing. As technology continues to change the way people live their lives—both personally and professionally—businesses need to revamp how they operate and relate with internal and external stakeholders. This is a major undertaking and many companies continue to grapple with how to take their digital transformation beyond parity and build it into a true competitive advantage. According to IDC , global spending on digital transformation efforts will reach a staggering $1.7 trillion by the end of this year—that’s about the same as the GDP for Canada in 2018, the 10th largest economy in the world—and digital transformation spending is up 42 percent from 2017. Yet, half of U.S. business leaders believe their companies are failing to implement digital transformation strategies and 22 percent think their digital transformation efforts are currently useless, according to a recent survey from Wipro Digital. Too often, businesses leaders get fixated on the technology platform and data strategy they want to achieve first, giving less importance to the critical parallel steps of engaging employees inside the business and the customers who fuel it. The Customer Journey Begins with Your Employees Although technology implementation is a vital part of the process, long gone are the days when firms can delegate their digital plan to a single department. Transformation requires every part of the business to participate. This is especially true for any part of the business with customer-relevant roles, whether that’s sales, customer support, marketing, engineering, IT, or a dedicated digital team. Digital transformation is only a competitive advantage when it results in positive customer experiences. Creating them requires an innovative, productive culture of collaboration across business teams and a shared sense of responsibility for the customer journey . One good way to ensure this is to assemble a dedicated customer experience team. Many parts of your business have direct and indirect contact with customers and need to be involved in the digital experience transformation process. It’s also true that these departments have their own day-to-day roles and responsibilities to manage, as well as established interests in the traditional way of doing things. Creating a dedicated team accountable directly to leadership, responsible for the customer experience and focused on collaboration often results in faster implementation, greater cooperation, and higher satisfaction for new digital strategies. Finding strong talent to manage transformation can sometimes hinder transformation efforts. According to Constellation Research’s most recent digital transformation study, leaders identified “staffing, recruiting and training” as a top challenge, second only to cultural change. External partners can help bridge this gap, not only complementing efforts of internal teams but also providing an “objective” eye to the overall transformation project. Thus, an effective strategy is to engage with a knowledgeable partner, whether that’s a global consultant, a systems integrator, or a global agency with experience leading clients through the challenges and best practices of digital transformation. Partners look at a client’s digital transformation vision and customer experience goals with a broader lens. They have deep relationships, multi-industry expertise, and capabilities to help businesses fine-tune competitive advantage. They can also offer much-needed scale and implementation services to help cover gaps as a business’ digital strategy matures or accelerates. Data Fuels Transformation and Keeps It Going It’s only once the customer is at the center of your digital strategy, and every aspect of the business is aligned, that data truly can play its shining role. Make no mistake—successful digital transformation requires data. Without it, there’s no clear view of the customer, no recognition of new opportunity, and no positive control of the business. According to a study by MIT Technology Review, 78 percent of companies struggle with how to digest, analyze, and interpret their current volume of data. The problem is that data is fractured in most businesses—it comes from multiple sources, is stored in different systems, and is used for different purposes. Getting your data in shape isn’t an easy task and requires a close partnership between IT and the rest of the organization. Too often, data is spread across multiple siloes both within the organization and with external partners. Fractured data leads to disjointed customer experiences and missed opportunities, so it’s critical to develop a plan and a capability for uniting and analyzing disparate data sources in a coordinated, cohesive way. Second, it’s critical to implement a common data language across your company to make sure your data is useful and actionable. This involves taking all of the data you have access to, including behavioral, transactional, and operational data, and applying the proper semantics to it so it all speaks the same language. Finally, data needs to be actionable. Each part of the business needs a plan for creating, collecting, analyzing, and acting on the data. Done correctly, it becomes a self-sustaining practice that builds a closer understanding of both the customer and business, garners more effective intelligence, and ultimately extracts more value from data to better serve customers. The question is not whether companies should undergo digital transformation but how and when. The when is now. The how depends on leadership focus, employee engagement from top to bottom, partner collaboration, and investment in actionable data. Companies that understand this will be best positioned to master the new digital landscape. Did you find this useful? Yes