Saturday 24 December 2016

Fail fast approach to Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is changing the way customers think & demand new products or services.

Today Bank accounts are opened online, Insurance claims are filed online, patient’s health is monitored online while buying things online is the thing of past. Everything is here and now in real time.

Till a few years back any failure of decision making in business was scary & not acceptable. It had cost companies to go out of the fortune 100 lists. Blockbuster, Nokia, Kodak, Blackberry are well-known examples of not trying new experiments quickly.

But with the digital era, failure is accepted & it is seen as part and parcel of a successful digital business. Failure must be fast, and the lessons of failure learned should be even faster. It allows businesses to take a shotgun approach to digital transformation.

Fail fast is all about deploying quick pilots and check the outcome. If it does not work then drop the concept/idea and move on to the new one. Be prepared to change the pace or direction as necessary.

No business will undergo the digital transformation without making any mistakes. Even if an organization has the best possible culture & strategy in place, there will be stumbling blocks on the road to success. With the digital technologies like Cloud, Big Data, Analytics, Mobility, Internet of Things, at the disposal, organizations can test innovative ideas quickly before even reaching out to the customer for feedback.

Speed is of the essence here. Testing all the ideas without making huge investments, then delivering the applications in weeks and not months or years to remain competitive. This change has helped organizations to reduce the time-to-market of enhancement on customer experience.

Apple is an example of a company which failed but didn’t give up. It moved on, refined its approach, improved its R&D and eventually launched the product its customers deserved.

Domino's bounced back from customers comments like “your pizza tastes like a cardboard”. With the reboot of the menu in 2009 & digital technology, they experimented online ordering, created a tracker, which allowed customers to follow their pizza from the oven to their doorstep.

Air New Zeland has gone from posting the largest corporate loss in its country’s history to being one of the world’s most consistently profitable airlines by using Big Data Analytics to enhance the customer experience in many ways including biometric baggage check-in, an electronic “air band” for unaccompanied minors.

There are several individual examples of failures and success over time:
·        Steve Jobs was fired from the Apple but came back as CEO & made history
·        Thomas Edison failed over 10000 times before success of light bulb
·        J K Rowling of Harry Potter had lots of failures
·        Michael Jordan succeeded after his constant failure to win

But organizations don’t have this time at their hand. They can learn a lot from these individuals failures but quickly move on and achieve success in Digital Transformation.

In Digital Transformation, fail fast is not an option but it is a requirement!!

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