According to the MIT Sloan Management Review, companies that have embraced digital transformation are 26% more profitable than their average industry competitors and see 12% higher market valuation.

I was recently invited to speak at the 2019 'Digital Transformation Summit'. 

I accepted the invite on the basis they understood I wasn't going to talk about technology!!!

Over the years I've seen and been involved with all kinds of 'transformation' projects. Very few have been proactive in nature, and most have been driven out reactive necessity to a decline in growth, loss of market share, along with the inevitable decline in profit. 

Every company is in constant search of that 'silver Bullet' that will change the way the company can perform, operate, and grow. 

We all know there is no such thing as a silver bullet but it doesn't stop the deluded from buying into the tech vendors view of what 'Digital Transformation' should include, and of course it has to include their latest game changing technology solution. 

After all isn't that what we mean by being 'digital'?. 

Businesses are impacted first of all by a combination of external forces, mainly the customer who is responding to a nearest competitor as they seem to be able to better understand the 'why' than you do. 

They are also impacted by internal forces that are still trying to make what worked in the early days of the millenium and haven't yet took time to look at the changing 'behaviour' of the customers who once thought you were the brand to be with.

Of course to move on you must adopt the right technology and improvement in processes, but if you haven't taken the time to understand how you lost your 'why', and are still ignoring those critical changes in consumer 'behaviour' then no amount of clever 'digital' solutions will change anything.

As Marc Benioff CEO of Salesforce.com says;

"Digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to create new — or modify existing — business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. This reimagining of business in the digital age is digital transformation."