The concept of a digital transformation is an evolving discussion that continues to bring more challenging discussions with leadership . If your business is direct to consumer or service focused, then you are feeling the pressure of disruption and increasing consumer demands. Building a business case for a major digital transformation required mindfulness of how to present the risk of disruption with the operating efficiencies that could be realized. We learned that the following approach successful identified the customer impact and back-office efficiencies that could be achieved in our future state cloud architecture.
1. Revenue Focused Return on Investment vs Operational
The direction for our business case initially started with a focus on the ROI for the back-office with annualized quantification of manual processes. This brought transparency to the Board in a way that hadn’t been previously presented.
2. Assessing the ROI
Our ROI model considered increased revenue opportunities, operational efficiencies, and cost avoidance areas. When aggregating the results of our wall to wall – people, process and technology assessment – we were able to conservatively focus on operational efficiencies with the added benefits of increased engagement.
3. Identifying the KPIs
At a high level, the KPI for the project was maintaining full membership within the organization, but this was also broken out into ten other operational and interaction related metrics so we could ensure that we were focused on measuring these areas during the ideation and design phases, as well as post-launch.
4. Defining Phases of Scope to Build Innovation Momentum
When presented with the opportunities that digital solutions can bring from the more interactive web, native mobile apps, beacons, and geofencing – it is easy to get excited with the opportunities to implement truly transformational experiences for the customer.
However, balancing the level of transformation in the back-office from continuous content development, data analytics, and the digital mindset, easing into a continuous development and deployment model was the best approach.
Traditional enterprise system implementations have been implementing multi-phased projects so this was the most effective approach to getting the Board comfortable with transformation as a holistic approach. In essence, achieving a continuous development and deployment model was implemented with a deployment schedule that achieved the goal of creating a living platform.
How WHIM can help:
At Whim, we help our clients understand and stay ahead of the customer’s needs. We help implement innovative digital platforms, real-time analytics, 360-degree feedback loops, and continuous deployment models into the process to ensure the customer experience is seamless across all channels.