Great question! One without any one silver bullet answer, I'd say. What's out there today are what we can loosely sum up as best results, and therefore loosely characterized as ‘best practices’ of some sort - based on the successes recorded in that time for the businesses aspiration.
Lots of very important points are being made in reply to this question you’ve raised. And I think it boils down to this, that fundamental principle of Digital Transformation, is to what degree the application of digital succeeds in driving an incremental organizational value, with relevance of course to a new age of consumer behavior and dynamics.
It is increasingly making more sense for organizations to adopt digital technologies, therefore to impact on ultimately on new business models, operating models and eventually the quality of engagement with customers. In that sense it measuring digital transformation becomes an understanding of the application of digital technologies in a 3-dimensional space, within a factor time.
Fig. Value space for Digital Transformation aspirations (draft).
In what I call the Digital Transformation Value Space (3 axis + 1 - time), businesses will be able to measure the Digital transformation by how well they manage and orchestrate - altogether – the 3-dimensions in the “age they operator in – time) to deliver on the "organizational success" targeted.
Some business strategies will use digital technologies to improve Operations Efficiency (automation, efficiency etc.), others will seek to equally include the ability to offer more value to customers by way of better personalization through digitalized engagement (e.g. real-time interactions or self-service capabilities) and so is the opportunity to also completely offer new business engagement, on top of the two (Operations value, Customer value), to radically shift the outreach of the business from what it was before.
I believe the ability of an organization, therefore, to be able to shift all three “value-axis” is ultimate based on level of capability maturity, albeit very rear and difficult to many other business who already have existing ‘cash cow’, with most business performance hinged on KPI’s that end up constraining “disruption” in their own right.
On the other hand, we’ve also seen very bold moves by many other organizations, mostly disrupters who can practically ‘rise up overnight’ due to the fact that there is nothing by way of “business as usual” to ‘break loose of’, and thus create new market offerings that become significant wins – by playing on the key and most significant principle of attracting or creating “trends” using millennial.
To help the industry begin to measure and manage Digital Transformation, and therefore what has been collaboratively agreed to as a Digital Maturity Model and Metrics (DMMM), the Forum is collaboratively working with its members to develop such a tool that can be used to measure using some forms of metrics and ratings agreed to by way of terminology and nomenclature. I’d recommend that you join this project or at least try to participate in the discussions that are ongoing within the Forum.
The project site can be accessed here https://www.tmforum.org/digital-maturity-model-metrics/
We should be able to as well learn from yours and any other members’ perspective to iteratively position and improve this industry sought after measurement tool.
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Emmanuel Amamoo-Otchere
Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd
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Original Message:
Sent: 03-23-2017 15:41
From: Ranbir Parmar
Subject: Digital Transformation
How do you manage digital transformation of ever expanding services/apps offered by today's telecom and/or communication networks? What is used, proposed, envisioned interface for the above activity/ies?
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Ranbir Parmar
Ranbir Singh Parmar
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