How to make sure your digital transformation gets the white glove treatment

More often than not, organizations stumble into a digital transformation. During the process of kicking off a siloed IT or business investment, they soon realize a comprehensive approach, or digital transformation, was needed from the beginning.

Unfortunately, this “realization process” usually involves some degree of iteration, highlighted by sub-par results or wasted investment.

Rather than focusing on the unfortunate steps that often come before a client engages with TTEC Digital, this blog will focus on helping organizations to circumvent these issues altogether.

At TTEC Digital, we start every digital transformation engagement with a three-pronged strategic approach to ensure our team gets to the heart of the issue — rather than the most visible symptoms. Let’s take a look at what that approach includes.

• Defining business outcomes, KPIs, and the business future state vision
• Detailing the technology roadmap needed to enable the future state vision
• Designing the execution roadmap and operating model for delivery

Business outcomes

Clients typically come to TTEC Digital with a handful of goals identified, including:

1. Digital modernization to meet customer and market demands
2. Cloud migration and business/IT modernization
3. An existing platform is not doing what the business needs, so a new platform is being procured
4. Consolidation of technology stack with digital modernization
5. A combination of the above

However, these preliminary diagnoses can be incomplete at times, and they don’t always encompass the full list of outcomes an organization is looking for when the transformation is all said and done.

Establishing business outcomes first is a critical step to enabling digital transformation success, specifically answering the question, “What are we looking to achieve?” Business outcomes enable the organization to clearly define an end-state and the KPIs for measuring progress towards that end-state and beyond. If every single technology initiative is mapped to business outcomes, design-specific issues that cause millions in rework and lead to delays in time-to-market are much less common.

At TTEC Digital, when we assist clients with establishing business outcomes, we take a technology-agnostic approach to focus purely on what the business is looking to achieve as well as evaluating the customer’s needs and the business’s ability to meet those needs.

The success of a digital transformation engagement is often measured in part by a business’ ability to not only meet but exceed the needs of a customer who is used to leveraging a digitally modernized competitor. Our technology-agnostic perspective enables us to turn customer data and documented capability gaps into design considerations. Then we combine these elements with the right thought leadership and industry expertise to formulate a business future state with business outcomes mapped to technology initiatives.

Technology roadmap

Many organizations attempt to solve technology issues by simply looking to purchase another platform. However, many times the new, chosen platform ends up being far too expensive due to licensing costs required to integrate extensive advanced features. Alternately, some organizations don’t spend the time to zero in on a business design first, therefore they struggle to build an accurate list of criteria for platform selection. In both cases, the result is increased technical debt and an implementation yielding unsatisfactory results. Even worse, some organizations will find themselves with two platforms performing similar functions but will be unable to sunset either one from their tech stack.

After completing the business outcomes and future-state vision exercise, it becomes much easier for an organization to holistically assess capabilities and platform features. When you work with TTEC Digital, we’ll also take a look at other critical elements of platform selection such as:

• Market presence of certified resources
• Scalability and sustainability
• Licensing costs and levels
• R&D investment — features in development and history/velocity of new releases

Finally, evaluating your current tech stack for capabilities is critical. You might already have many of the capabilities you need to achieve your desired business outcomes and future state. By taking this step, an organization can make sure any new platform is not chosen at increased cost when certain capabilities were not needed in the first place.

When all existing platforms and capabilities have been cross-referenced to your future-state needs, an experienced transformation partner like TTEC Digital can rapidly figure out what platforms will and will not meet the needs of your organization most cost-effectively. Every organization’s journey is unique, and investing due diligence into this exercise will limit costly rework and protect against the all-too-common pains of failed implementations.

Execution roadmap

To establish an execution roadmap to enable a digital transformation journey, it is critical to consider organizational mandates, priorities, business units, or lines of business in the scope of the project, as well as the existing operating structure.

You might ask, where do you start with such an open-ended task? At TTEC Digital, we encourage organizations to start by evaluating opportunities for ROI via productivity gains, reduction in TCO and sunsetting platforms, and other important revenue-generating/customer focused use cases.

Focusing on use case evaluation is critical to creating multiple phases of value and building on the implementation, while also enabling the business and employee base in an appropriate schedule of delivery. This also allows you and your transformation partner to better understand the order of features to implement based on value to the organization. Every journey is unique, but the due diligence and approach described above enable TTEC Digital clients to achieve the critical goal of enabling an optimized, omnichannel environment.

Next steps in your cloud journey

Getting started the right way the first time is critical to the success of a digital transformation engagement. To get it right the first time, digital transformation ultimately requires a trusted partner with experience architecting the journey — and few companies can offer the suite of services and the level of expertise offered by our team here at TTEC Digital. Before you move to transform your organization, get in touch with our team of experts, so we can provide insights and clarity into the journey.