Most businesses wouldn’t claim to be digital technology experts, so choosing a trusted DX advisor is key to a successful digital transformation journey. But it’s not easy. Does the advisor using the ‘trusted’ badge have the full range of skills and experience to assist with the specialist area of digital transformation? An ‘advisor’ who makes blind recommendations of a mix of cloud software products that seem to work well for similar business types does not make them a DX advisor. Ask, “Would that advisor be qualified and respected within Microsoft, Apple, or Google to direct their respective DX journeys”?
To set a business on a DX journey and advise it along the way, the DX advisor must possess proven expertise to assess top-down business goals and capabilities and provide effective digital solutions. This is likely to include the selection of supporting third party (digital) managed services. The advisor must have empathy and a full understanding of their client’s ecosystem; its environment, stakeholder needs, budget, ethics and values. The advisor must also be expert in data management and cyber security to ensure the business is not left vulnerable to specific operational, regulatory, reputational, or financial risks and how those risks might affect business continuity. Processing orders, manufacturing, distribution and ensuring projects keep running without disruption all depend on data security and are part of the DX journey.
Business Intelligence (BI) and the aligned area of AI, robotics or VR in some business sectors, must also be assessed along the DX journey. For instance, what reporting, or automation can detect potential risks to be mitigated or opportunities to be explored? Detecting patterns, including fraud, once relied on samples of data sets as it was too economic or impractical to work with all data. Now analysis of entire ‘big data’ sets stored in the cloud make statistical sampling progressively redundant. Sampling error is no longer a factor because the results are complete and in real time.