How can we achieve a sustainable and successful digital transformation with AI? Digital Transformation is fundamentally about innovation. It demonstrates how the organisation views innovation. Innovation becomes increasingly crucial when we consider the business needs to keep up with increasing customer expectations. Customers are not simply expecting a solution any more. Customers are looking for meaning, and they expect to have their voices heard.
The innovation of meaning will give organizations a differentiator in business. Having a digital transformation strategy means having an innovation strategy, and discovering what is meaningful to customers.
Digital Transformation reveals your organisation’s attitude towards purpose and innovation
Effective digital transformation means that organizations need to question themselves about the focus on innovation in the organization. Are they choosing the right innovation strategy, and what is the role of data in innovation?
Some organisations are stuck at using business intelligence to describe their business and their customers. Other organisations will advance towards flexible, ad-hoc analytics of the data where business users can innovate by asking questions of the data. It’s not just about data scientists, however. There is a strong need for data interpreters who can translate the analytics into something meaningful. Businesses can find their own stories and build out an understanding culture.
Digital Transformation means creating an Understanding Culture
For digital transformation, organisations should not focus on creating a knowledge culture; organisations need to create an understanding culture. In digital transformation, organisations need to be innovation-centred in order to be truly customer-focused. Organisations need to be understanding-driven to really understand their customers. An understanding-based approach can help your organization to know what is meaningful to your customers, and align your teams towards delivering innovative solutions through digital transformation. Ethics is becoming an increasingly important aspect of AI. Although this involves difficult conversations, it can help to provide an understanding culture if it is approached properly.
What do you need to consider towards an understanding culture in Digital Transformation?
From the data perspective, the data becomes the voice of the customer. When there is an overabundance of data, how do you know what data is meaningful? Data is a commodity but we can’t assume that having lots of data will help you to find the best idea to support your vision. In the same way, having lots of data may not always lead to the best, meaningful ideas. It’s key to have the right data and the right insights to produce ideas that are aimed towards finding meaning for your customers.
What gives you the best idea? Meaning. The best ideas are meaningful, authentic and part of a bigger vision. Diversity and inclusion are so important; they help us by providing different lenses to help organisations to determine what is truly meaningful to customers.
Metrics help you hear your customer talk. But metrics are not enough to help organizations discern what they mean.
Sales data can help us to hear the voice of the customer, but it will only be as good as the data. To get started, it’s important to review data quality as a part of a digital transformation initiative. It’s also a good idea to integrate your CRM solution with your data so you have more of the right data to help generate ideas. AI is a tool that feeds not only on data, but the right data, will help provide the right kind of clues. It’s more than social media metrics. It needs an open mind and diverse lenses.
AI isn’t your garbage collector. Garbage In, Garbage Out still applies.
AI is a source of innovation but you need proper “good enough” data before you can think about AI. In data warehousing, there is the term “garbage in, garbage out” and the same is also true in Artificial Intelligence. AI is nothing without data, and tools are becoming easier to use with AI technology.
To Trust, we have to understand. That goes for AI, too.
Trust is crucial for an understanding-driven culture. AI solutions can often appear difficult to understand, which means that they are difficult to trust. Fortunately, there is an emphasis on explainability in Artificial Intelligence solutions which can help to clarify how the AI solution came to a particular decision. Data Science solutions offer explainability, helping to build trust.
We all have diversity in common, and it gives us a new lense to understand our customers, our colleagues and ourselves.
To summarise, we all have diversity and data in common. Diverse perspectives provide a different lens on the customer voice, actively contributing to an understanding-driven culture. Whether we are setting the business direction or supporting the technology, everyone is part of the data story in the organisation. Data touches everyone in the organisation, and allowing everyone a voice at the table will help to discern meaning.
AI is not a goal in itself; the goal is to have an understanding-driven culture which can have AI as a tool
We can all participate in an understanding culture which has data at its heart. Digital Transformation touches every aspect of the organisation because data is part of the circulatory system of the organisation. AI also relies on data; without data, AI is nothing. Digital Transformation with an AI-focus is all very well, but it needs to show value and be tied to company goals. AI needs to prove itself with a healthy focus on data, and demonstrate value as part of a bigger Digital Transformation
Building an understanding-driven culture will put customers at the heart of innovation and central to digital transformation, maximising the opportunities for success.
Next Steps
We can all participate in an understanding culture which has data at its heart. Digital Transformation touches every aspect of the organisation because data is part of the circulatory system of the organisation. Building an understanding-driven culture will put customers at the heart of innovation and central to digital transformation, maximising the opportunities for success.
Get in touch if you would like to learn more about how we can help your organisation to become understanding-driven.
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