The pace of technological change over the last five years is unparalleled. Today, it seems that every business is aggressively pushing the digital transformation roadmap, ultimately on the migration to digital transformation mode. Come 2020, many believe that close to 90% of companies, regardless of size, will operate in digital mode, becoming exceptionally productive and challenging the status quo.

Companies latching on to disconnected tactical initiatives will only languish behind the competition before fading into extinction. Whether you like it or not, the writing on the wall is clear – do or die. That’s because 2020 and beyond is all about spearheading adaptation of intelligent technologies and acquiring a larger share of the opportunity pie rather than ‘fixing’ the process.

A Digitalist Magazine article published recently by Satyanarayana (Satya) Rao Karri, a Business Transformation Advisor and Enterprise Architect at SAP, outlines an approach for leveraging your vision, strategy, and goals to plan the holistic digital transformation of your business, in turn allowing you to:

• Align future strategy and investments toward a long-term vision
• Maximize benefits and returns
• Enhance customer experience
• Minimize business disruption

Where do you start?
The old adage says, ‘Charity begins at home.’ This is true even in the business context, starting with gaining insight into the internal state of your organization. This is best achieved by understanding the vision and mission of the organization while ensuring the business and IT strategies are connected and aligned properly.

The First Step
The first step in this journey involves understanding the critical importance of the migration to digital transformation and mapping the relevant strategic components of it based on their complexity and importance.

Key aspects to consider include:

• Your existing landscape – stability, complexity, customization, etc.
• Current usage of capabilities and functionalities – overlapping applications scope
• Use of leading practices – level of operational excellence
• End-user expectations and level of satisfaction

Implementation strategies
In his article, Satya states: “Not every implementation strategy is a right fit for every business scenario. To identify the right strategy, identify a list of key decision factors and assign a weight to each based on the business inputs. Calculate a weighted average for each deployment option based on these key decision factors, and select the option with the most favorable score.”

Once the deployment option is finalized, you can select both the target and transient architectures for the IT landscape.

Here is my question: Do you have your digital transformation roadmap ready? If not, now is the time to develop one. Formulating the digital transformation roadmap is the key to putting the pieces together. Essentially, this means that mapping your solution capabilities, technology dependencies, organizational change management and a host of other things determines the turning point at which your organization moves from your current state to your future digital state.

In the end, it comes down to this: Where do you want to be in 2020? At the head of the line reaping the benefits of Intelligent Enterprise, or near the end, waiting to pick up the scraps the leaders leave behind?

You may be currently running any ERP (SAP or Oracle or Microsoft) and planning to move towards becoming an Intelligent Enterprise in the near term. If so, Phoenix should be your trusted partner of choice; we specialize in delivering the Intelligent Enterprise technologies that key Digital Transformations. Last Friday October 4th, Phoenix organized a 30-minute Executive Webinar on the current state of SAP S/4HANA migration. The response was overwhelming.

If you missed, click here for the Webinar Replay.