Top five ways to transform your company digitally

Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz, discusses the importance making drastic, strategic changes to your organisation

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Management Today

‘Digital transformation’; it’s a phrase we often hear, but what exactly does it entail and how do we go about implementing it? CEO of Publicis Sapient, author of Digital Business Transformation:How Established Companies Sustain Competitive Advantage From Now to Next, Nigel Vaz, gives his top five tips. 

1) Make digital the core

Rather than ‘digital transformation’, we should discuss ‘digital business transformation’. The digital side should be at the core of your organisation. Many companies may believe they are digitally competent, but they are not. Similarly, many organisations claim to be agile, but agility is only one small aspect of digital transformation. 

Digital transformation revolves around ‘how’ we complete tasks; agility should, instead, be thought of at the organisational level and how to make internal improvements.

2) Planning!

Digital business transformation is here to stay. It is an ongoing commitment to adapting to the ever-changing needs of the customer and may require you to reassess how you manage your organisation. Most organisations will be adept and successful at their fundamentals, but this may not be sufficient in the future. 

We must re-imagine our organisations within the digital world, and have a clear vision of how to achieve this. 

3) Constant change

Committing to a constant state of change is necessary if your organisation is to meet its digital transformation goals. Change – or improvement – is about achieving short-term goals on the journey to reaching your long-term target. In order to get these quick wins, managers must delegate and prioritise tasks. 

This is the venture capitalist approach, developing ‘SPEED’ capabilities – rooted in Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering and Data.

4) Keep an eye on the trends 

Many old habits need to be left in the past. Managers cannot continue to run their organisations in the same way, year-on-year. Connectivity between products and services is necessary and, in order to achieve this, data analysis is vital.

Within product design, data-collection feeds companies with the important information to create a generative loop across the organisation.

5) Think ‘outside the box’

Hopefully, by now, you agree there is a need for change; if so, you are ahead of the curve and most company leaders stuck in the transformation process. Their entrenched behaviours prevent them from taking the next step. Digital business transformation will affect all parts and workers in the organisation. It also requires resilience and a strong leader. 

This leader should be able to embed change as a core capability and involve everyone in this development.  

Leaders need to embrace and promote ‘inversion’ and – simultaneously – to try to erase all they know, or think they know, about the organisation. The ability to invert is the starting point to change and, therefore, to progressing into the digital world.