Business leaders are increasingly being challenged to move their enterprises to the next level by employing digital technologies to create new ways of operating and growing their businesses.
At IDC, we refer to this progression as ‘Digital Transformation’ (DX), a continuous process by which enterprises adapt to or drive disruptive changes in their external ecosystems of customers and markets.
By embarking on the DX journey, enterprises are able to leverage digital competencies to deliver products and services that seamlessly blend both digital and physical attributes into the wider customer experience, while simultaneously improving operational efficiencies and organisational performance. Given the key role that both technology and information must play in this transformation, it makes sense for the CIO to be heavily involved throughout. But will CIOs be given the chance, and if so, will they seize the opportunity?
Digital transformation is a foregone conclusion for most, if not all, businesses. The choices now are to entrench and hope for the best; develop digital transformation competencies and become a disrupter; or split the difference and become a follower. Given these choices, IDC believes that CIOs should look to align their IT activities with the prerequisites for true digital transformation by improving the customer experience and pursuing digitally enabled products and services.
They should shift their focus away from short-term internal operations to longer-term external projects, and also look to reduce the amount of time they have to spend on driving IT service availability, cost reductions, and business process optimisation. In this regard, it is critically important that CIOs look to maximise the time spent on innovative activities aimed at creating new IT services, improving the time to market, and increasing revenue.
A common misconception is that the DX journey is solely for private sector organisations. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. For government entities, IDC defines DX as a “fundamental and continuous process of change to operating and programmatic models that leverage digital and tangential technologies to drive innovation in engagement and service delivery to citizens, businesses, and other government agencies, while also improving government efficiency and effectiveness”.
Eventually, all government programmes and agencies will go through one or more digital transformation efforts. Whether these efforts will be successful and the results beneficial to both the target audience and the government will be dependent on how well aligned government efforts are with the overarching programme objectives and how well the agency in question is able to select appropriate business outcomes based on the level of engagement and the level of government.
Broadly speaking, I expect there to be three main focus areas for government departments within the UAE — improving the citizen experience, driving the concept of ‘government as a platform’, and enhancing the role of Smart Cities. Citizens and residents are demanding a consistent experience across omni-channel platforms so they can choose the one channel that is most convenient for them based on their individual context. The challenge is to optimise the composite outcomes of many often uncontrollable external factors that result in the citizen/resident experience.
Many government agencies are expected to consider a series of cross-departmental digital platforms by 2020, covering services such as payments, messaging, and appointment bookings, as well as behind-the-scenes platforms to keep information secure.
As such, IDC firmly believes that government organisations must start to think about purchasing more from the cloud — buying insights instead of tools, using existing social media platforms and mobile apps, and plugging and playing services from private partners to verify the identity of citizens/residents from end to end.
Smart cities are typically designed to enable economic development and foster environmental and social sustainability in a way that eases the stresses caused on the city’s infrastructure and resources by urban population growth, increasing global competition for skilled workers, and the impact of severe weather patterns and climate change.
Smart cities are on a journey from siloed initiatives to platforms that can optimise the efficiency and effectiveness of city assets, and the role of these cities in driving true digital transformation throughout the wider populace must be central to any successful government DX initiative.
The world of digital transformation can be split into resisters, explorers, players, transformers, and disrupters, and simply dabbling in digital initiatives will not get you where you need to be in order to compete with the lean and lethal digital start-ups ready to grab your market share.
An optimised, end-to-end digital transformation strategy can help your organisation work faster, lead smarter, and win the talent wars, enabling you to outwit your competitors and deploy technology solutions that reduce the risk and increase the reward. With that in mind, why wait any longer?
The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC) He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC.
