First, the definition of transformation

The definition of CIO Pages puts more emphasis on reinventing the business model through people, product and other factors.

  • Digital transformation is first and foremost a business transformation — covering operating models, people, culture, and processes.
  • Digital transformation is a fundamental and intrusive work….

I prefer this classic definition, which is very logical:

“Digital transformation is a high-level transformation based on Digitization and Digitalization, which further touches on the company’s core business and aims to build a new business model. “Digital Transformation is about developing Digital technologies and enabling capabilities to create a dynamic Digital business model.”

Digitization is the essential element of Digitization, while Digitalization is the Digitalization of business capabilities centered on core values. Transformation further completed the change of business model on the basis of the former two. Data is the business….

I think digitization is not an academic concept. It is a dynamic practice mode that requires full imagination. It itself is still expanding and evolving rapidly in the real world.

True digital transformation requires answering the following strategic questions

Such as:

  • “How will my business look after this transformation?”
  • “What new value will we create? Why must we go digital?”
  • “How do we generate revenue and digitally support critical operations like manufacturing and sales?”
  • “What are our input-outputs?”

Here, I would like to say that digital transformation is not just a technological transformation. Technology is just a facilitator. A customer-focused culture, strong leadership and a comprehensive ability to lead management change are key factors for digital success.

When a company announces a billion-dollar digital transformation to the media, the first challenge will be a frenzy of media buzz and the pressure from society at large to pay attention.

Let’s review the “Typical Cases of Digital Transformation of State-owned Enterprises in 2020” published on the website of SASAC:

A total of 100 typical cases of 8 categories, including product and service innovation, intelligent production and operation, digital marketing service, digital ecology, new generation information technology, industrial control safety, integrated management system and synthesis, were selected by relevant experts, including 30 excellent cases and 70 typical cases.

The following cases will continue to be closely watched, both for their achievements and for future business development.

  • On the one hand, substantial investment in such transformational projects is a prerequisite, and effective planning is important, including: setting priorities and planning appropriately is critical to achieving quick wins and maintaining high progress.
  • On the other hand, being too distracted tends to focus only on the surface, which can lead to a company’s digital transformation failing, no matter how ambitious the solution they implement.
  • On the other hand, it is to blindly copy the digital model of others and ignore the insight of their own business model, for example, I built a middle platform to….. It’s no different from me paying a lot of money for a cabbage.

Third, the driving factors of enterprise digitalization

The actual image of banks is no longer a simple physical network, but more online services and zero-contact services. Digital genes are gradually implanted into the business channels, products and services and customers of banks. The competition of banks in the future will surely be the competition of speed and quality of digital strategic transformation.


– the rationale

  • The general trend of customer expectations

Companies like Apple, Zappos, Spotify, Airbnb, Amazon and others have made customer experience a key measure of corporate success. Customers’ experience in banking, retail stores and home services is gradually shifting from offline to terminal. Comfortable and personalized experience is what they value.

  • Digital disrupter of the tide

What customers expect is dictated by tech giants and emerging startups that are upending the traditional paradigm. Apple, Netflix, Facebook, Google — the companies that the media once called digital disruptors — are now giants, and they’re still spreading their influence to every corner of the industry.

  • The mobility of the general trend

Instead of being chained to our desks, we can now do all these things on our mobile devices, including communicating, trading, learning, sharing and locating. The Great Mobility Revolution is also driving major changes across businesses, whether they are engaged in B2C, B2B, B2B2C or any variant of it. Front-end user experience is changing, social interaction is changing, transaction patterns are changing, and even demand chains and entire supply chains are going online.

  • cloud

The cloud revolution is another key factor driving the digital revolution. It is both a driving force and an enabler. Businesses are rapidly moving to the cloud, initially to store and use applications such as CRM, SFA, Helpdesk, and HCM type functions. Many enterprises are moving their core services and critical applications to the cloud. It’s no longer about “Why go to the cloud?” it’s about “Why don’t you go to the cloud?”

  • Big data and analytics

The emergence of big data analytics, both predictive and decision analytics, is another big driver of digital business transformation. Data-driven decision making is at the heart of the transformation that industries are focusing on.

  • Artificial intelligence and cognitive technology

The surge of RPA, IoT, machine learning, AI, and related cognitive technologies is fueling the digital transformation. Who is the first to achieve technological empowerment, who is the first to complete competitiveness upgrading.

Whether an industrial enterprise or a production line is intelligent or not depends on how many intelligent devices it has, whether it uses artificial intelligence or big data analysis. These are not important… What matters is whether an enterprise and a production line can make real-time response to changes in the external environment.


– AnXiaoPeng

IV. Key areas of digital transformation in value chain

In terms of digital implementation, most enterprises focus on the following aspects:

  • Improving customer experience: Enhancing customer experience is one of the key business outcomes of digitization.
  • Reduce the cost structure and automate work: Rely on automation, especially intelligent automation, to complete digital and automated tasks under pressure on margins.
  • Respond to market changes and launch products faster: Many Internet companies can launch new product plans and new products almost every day. In large companies, where product launches typically take anywhere from a few quarters to a few years, elephants must learn to take baby steps to speed up time to market.

Facilitate data-driven decision making: In many organizations, decision making comes from instinct. More and more companies are using data to help executives make decisions.

  • Maximizing enterprise risk: Surviving iterations and being irreplaceable in the fierce evolutionary race are two key tasks for digitization.
  • Information security: offline to online, security situation changes, this does not repeat.
  • New business models and new revenue opportunities: Companies need to reinvent themselves and find new drivers.
  • Digital Business Transformation Framework: Digitization and transformation are really two things, but together they constitute a complex task. Companies must adopt a holistic digital transformation framework and tailor it to their enterprise’s unique needs in order to pursue their digital lives.

V. So, what is the digital transformation framework?

The Digital Business Transformation Framework is a conceptual description of the key stages and high-value activities in the process from vision to digital realization.

A typical digital transformation framework might include:

  • Transformation of the target
  • Guiding principles
  • The transformation of the content
  • The business scenario
  • Iterative phase
  • Key activities
  • Success factors
  • Risk factors for
  • Earnings forecast

Of course, not all of the above frameworks can be copied in your organization, and each organization is at a different stage. It is up to the team responsible for the transformation to define the scope and focus of the transformation and to encapsulate the essence of the work in an easily understood framework.

Below is a sample digital transformation framework from Ciopages.com.

VI. Basic and existing problems of digital transformation

Business leaders engaged in digital transformation must be able to answer the following twelve questions in order to develop an effective strategy and a viable path:

1) Know who the business is?

  • What is the nature of the business?
  • What’s the competition like?
  • What are the potential downside risks?
  • Which start-ups are taking your bottom line?

2) What does the company want to be?

  • Will online or mobile be an important part of your future strategy?
  • Future customer experience needs?

3) Are they consistent?

  • Does the leadership understand what the numbers really mean?
  • Is digitization really a transformative strategy in the enterprise?
  • Does it have the potential to form a digital culture?
  • Is there grassroots support? Can habits change?

4) How to make money now and how to make money in the future?

  • What new business models should be adopted?
  • Can this pattern be defined as a line of business?

5) Does the organizational structure support the digital model?

  • Is digitization a transformational 6 thing, or is it a theme for the entire organization?

6) Is the corporate culture fit to change to meet the challenges of the digital age?

  • Do most employees see themselves as part of the digital revolution and playing a role?

7) Does the organization have the right people with the right abilities, skills and determination to succeed in the digital age?

  • The digital business transformation requires a group of talented people with a wide range of skills. If the organization doesn’t already have such team members, is it willing to acquire them and provide the right environment for the team to succeed?

8) How efficient is the enterprise process and can it provide excellent customer experience?

  • This is closely related to business processes such as sales, production and service, which need to support the customer experience throughout the digital business transformation. This is the cornerstone of digital landing.

9) What is the channel strategy of the enterprise? How to adapt in digital mode?

  • What business streams, distribution channels and internal and external sales teams the existing enterprise has? What role will these channels play in the post-digital transformation and how to upgrade the enterprise ecosystem, including partners and external channels, to simultaneously transform to support the transformation of your digital business?

10) How will the enterprise product portfolio win a place in the digital market?

  • Some products can be sold as e-commerce or m-commerce. Some products may be modified to meet digital requirements. Some other products may have digital wrappers. In addition, some things need to be reimagined. So how will the portfolio be designed?

11) Is the organization building the right technology stack and digital technology?

  • Anchoring specific applications and solutions doesn’t make for a successful transition. The digital transformation requires addressing potential issues such as data, application architecture, and the convergence, integration, and extension of legacy applications.

12) Does the company invest adequately in its digital business strategy?

  • Digital transformation is expensive and complex. It is crucial to guide what it takes to make the digital transformation and to have the money and capacity to achieve it.

VII. Digital transformation strategy

The digital transformation strategy is a blueprint for setting the next direction. Companies that don’t have a clear, coherent strategy are ultimately less likely to succeed. Transformational actions often occur “The operation is successful, but the patient dies…….

It is necessary to construct a concise strategic model and understand the essence of digitalization to coherently elaborate the digitalization transformation strategy.

Some companies are looking for excellent digital transformation consultants to help them define and guide their digital transformation planning. A full digital transformation consulting is usually a multibillion-dollar business, domestic millions of digital transformation project will either stay at the top level design cannot fall to the ground, or focus on the field is too small, add or delete the data change, but for the whole enterprise business model did not change anything.

Whether you hire a digital consultant or do it yourself, digital transformation is a huge investment, not just a systems project or a spreadsheet project. Digital top-level design is a must, but at the same time, it is necessary to find core business scenarios to solve practical problems + find innovative models for implementation.

Finally, all digital transformation strategies need to answer the following basic questions:

  • Why is digital transformation needed? Clearly document strategic intent, vision, models, drivers, and key content.
  • What does digital mean? What are the expected outcomes – driving new revenue? Enhance the customer experience? Lower the cost structure? Companies – how to go digital? A transformational vision? What are the strategic, operational, technical and people levers? How the digital business model can help achieve that goal.
  • Where do you need a digital makeover? Positioning, business units, product areas, environment, and so on.
  • Which business processes need to be restructured? Who will be placed in charge of the different areas of the digital transformation? Although board members must be intricately involved, the appointment of a dedicated digital transformation manager is needed to help promote digital initiatives.
  • When should it happen? Rank and roll out of digital service functions?
  • How much will the digital trip cost and what are the benefits?
  • What tools, techniques and platforms will you use to achieve digital vision?

The truth is that a digital strategy alone is not enough. Getting the digital vision to the ground will be hard, costly and hard. But the payoff for succeeding in the digital transformation may be between staying alive and thriving.

“The truth is that digital transformation is not actually about adapting to new technologies at all, but about guiding organizations to become more adaptive to their own changes.”


“– Lindsay Herbert

1) Digital business capability

People use the term “digital capabilities” endlessly, but in a business context, digital business capabilities ultimately lie in the underlying value stream and process, and the digital or physical environment is really the environmental vehicle for their interactions, implementing the business in systems or applications. So digital business capabilities remain key in the digital ecosystem.

2) Numbers

3) We will find a lot of knowledge about digital capabilities:

When executives say, “Let’s improve the customer experience,” this is the goal they want or the desired strategic outcome;


The business leader might then say, “Achieving the highest customer experience score through seamless aftermarket service.” This is a business strategy.


When HR says, “We will need a customer-focused culture,” it really means corporate culture, change management, training and development.


Business architects would say, “An end-to-end buying process based on customer vision, from marketing to interactive buying, and after service.” Manipulated as a Value Stream, which is a high-level abstract description of the business architecture.”


Application architects say that functional areas such as lead management, product research, onboard, order management, order fulfillment, and account management can be digitized to improve the internal and external customer experience.


Infrastructure people will also say that “portal,” “mobile access,” “security and authentication,” and “data search” may be some of the underlying technologies that support these capabilities…………

Therefore, this means that the enterprise needs a comprehensive digital capability model, which includes detailing the digital capabilities of the business from the top level down to the base level.

The detailed breakdown of digital capabilities down to levels 3 or 4 can help the organization determine the execution details.

Digital capabilities must be mutually exclusive and exhaustive.

The figure below captures that just saying a word like “digital marketing” or “social media” is not enough, and that a deeper level of decomposition is needed to make functionality IT functional.

Ciopages.com has a model for the digital transition that provides a detailed list of digital features. Interested friends can look for.

VIII. Roadmap of Digital Transformation

The Digital Transformation Roadmap is a key deliverable that should be more detailed than a strategy document and more abstract than a project plan.

The roadmap, which centers on digital capabilities, lays out the following 9-step guide:

  • Build a mutually exclusive and fully covered digital capability model.
  • Match digital capabilities with digital vision, goals, and strategic pillars.
  • Assess the current state of the capabilities required for digital transformation and document the required maturity level.
  • Coordinate with various stakeholders to identify the data capabilities they need to achieve their goals.
  • Mapping capability requirements to systems/services (microservices or SOA) is a key factor in success and is part of the solution design/definition effort. Ensure that services are built at the right level of granularity.
  • Interdependence analysis of capability building.
  • Complete a capability-based digital business transformation roadmap.
  • Establish a project implementation plan consistent with capacity.
  • Required resources and budget.

The following is a sample view of the digital transformation roadmap for individual digitization capabilities.

9. Transformation of digital capabilities

Many large companies are using digitization as an opportunity to upgrade their overall business capabilities.

1) Marketing transformation

Since the advent of social media and the digital wave, marketing technology has advanced astonishingly.

2) CRM transformation

Thanks to companies like Salesforce.com, sales behavior has become the starting point of the enterprise SaaS digital revolution by connecting customers in a more convenient way.

3) Financial and financial transformation

In recent years, the model and function of finance are undergoing great changes. Finance has become a strategic function and a business driver. The digital transformation of financial functions has become the core of digitization in many enterprises.

4) Human resource transformation

In the digital age, people and data may be the most critical assets in any company. The employee experience is just as important as the customer experience. This is the transformational part of an organization that cares about internal and external customer operations.

5) Business intelligence and data analytics transformation

Big data analytics help companies transform data-driven decision-making, customer analytics, people analytics, operations analytics, and risk management. The transformation of data analytics and business intelligence is helping to add strategic value in many areas of capability and position companies to be ahead of the curve in a data-driven digital age.

6) Supply chain transformation

While many people focus on the demand chain, especially e-commerce and customer experience, supply chains are digital technologies and digital concepts that have revolutionized the way businesses relate to suppliers and partners, including sourcing, collaborating and innovating. More and more companies are reimagining their supply chains through the next generation of digital supply chain transformation.

Transformation of Digital Process

Digital process transformation or digital process reengineering differs from traditional process reengineering efforts in which cost reduction is usually the core focus. Today, digital process transformation typically involves three things:

  • Digital and intelligent automation: For example, if a bank needs to manually enter financial statement information for underwriting purposes, machine learning or RPA can be used to capture and extract attributes and fill them out in an automated manner.
  • Simplify the “experience” : Many of the transformation efforts in the digital age are actually aimed at simplifying and optimizing the omnished-channel experience for customers.
  • New ways of dealing with old things: For example, Didi uses technology (such as mobility, location-based services in a shared platform model) to disrupt traffic.

Therefore, when companies consider process reengineering or reengineering as part of digitization, they need to reconsider their value and, where possible, re-create processes. It’s not about increasing efficiency or eliminating a single step, it’s about disruption.

10. “Digitization”

“Thinking Numbers”, “Doing Numbers” and “Being Numbers” are three stages of digital thinking and culture.

How can traditional enterprises bridge the digital culture gap?

Digitization – Do and Don’t Do:

  • Digital culture cannot be achieved by simply following orders.
  • It has to start from scratch and trickle down into the team.
  • The leadership team must embrace digital concepts and implement them.
  • If an enterprise needs digitalization, it is difficult for it to complete the digitalization reform within the group itself. In the short term, it can rely on external consulting power, but in the medium and long term, the best way for an enterprise to realize digitalization must be by itself.
  • Design and experience are an integral part of digital capacity-building.
  • Use methods such as design thinking to help inspire the organization to move from status quo to leapfrog thinking.
  • Acquiring startup talent will help build a digital culture and drive digitalization quickly in the short term.

Digital transformation change management

  • The scale and influence of change management in the process of digital transformation cannot be ignored.
  • Since digitization is more about business transformation, cultural transformation, and people transformation (not just technology transformation), change management plays a pivotal role in making digital transformation an acceptable and rewarding outcome for employees.
  • Enterprises need a unified change management framework and change scheduling plan.

Ten benefits of digital transformation

  • Better customer experience: This is one of the core areas of focus for the digital transformation and therefore one of the benefits.
  • Reducing operating costs: Given the pressure on margins, reducing service costs through processes and robots is a benefit.
  • Better Compliance: Proper digitalization helps make risk and compliance management an integral part of operations.
  • Effective risk management: Enables the enterprise to manage enterprise risks and control risk vectors at all levels to achieve the goals and results of digital planning.
  • More insight into customers: Whether it’s segmentation of customers, churn forecasting customer analytics, or calculating purchase propensity, customer analytics has many new ways to acquire, convert, retain, and expand revenue.
  • Data-driven decision making: Dashboards, real-time pulse of the company, predictive analytics help better strategists and optimize decisions. Data-driven decision making is a key digital milestone for a transformational enterprise.
  • Eliminate silos: Process choreography and function development through digital transformation.
  • New business models, new products and better opportunities: digitization makes possible and feasible everything from data profiting to reaching global borders, from mass customization of products to achieving precise personalization.
  • Empowering employees: A digital culture with a customer-centric, employee-centric spirit and spiritual atmosphere can help employees feel empowered and transcend traditionally defined role boundaries. Virtualization allows working access from anywhere. BYOD makes it easy for you to get things done without too many tools.
  • Collaboration: Digital technology and digital thinking facilitate internal collaboration and external collaboration with ecosystem partners.

12. Why will the digital transformation fail?

The bigger and more ambitious the digital project, the more likely it is to fail.

9 Reasons Why Digital Transformation Plans Failed:

  • I don’t know what “digital transformation” is.
  • Vague support from the top leadership.
  • Jumping into the wrong digital strategy and transformation roadmap.
  • Underestimate the difficulty of the transition and think the last “mid-level” project will do.
  • The budget is inadequate.
  • Talent resources are scarce.
  • Focus on the bright spots and ignore the data base.
  • Underestimating change management.
  • It doesn’t solve or can’t solve cultural problems.

Digital tools and technology

Enterprises should do a proof of concept and test scenario scenarios before making large investments.

In addition, the digital transformation of IT is a means to achieve the digital transformation of the enterprise, rather than a goal.

Don’t think building your own cloud platform or big data is all you need.

The following 10 transformational technologies are for reference:

  • Data platform
  • 5 g and terminal
  • Enterprise Blockchain
  • Chat bots and voice-driven NLP proxies
  • Internet of Things and wearable devices
  • Big data and analytics
  • Machine learning and artificial intelligence
  • cloud
  • Network defense
  • Augmented reality

Source: Fan Long Notes


Author: Long eyes read the ball


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