Now Let’s Ask These 5 Questions That Are Critical to the Transformation Process to be a Success.

#1:  How effective is your company at leveraging data and analytics to scale your business model?

As I discussed above, missing any piece of data can be disastrous. All the data must be used to develop strategies and minimize investment risk.

  • Advance beyond the Business Monitoring stage where organizations are using data and analytics to monitor or report on what has happened.
  • Transition to business insights and business optimization in order to develop strategies based on the business data and insights.
  • Move into the Insights Monetization (not Data Monetization) phase where organizations monetize the insights that they have gathered about their customers, products, operations, and markets.

#2:  Do you understand your companies goal and how they benefit from company data & analytics?

If you want to deliver real business value with your big data initiative, then it only makes sense to focus on what’s important to the business. That means you need to invest the time to understand the company’s key business initiatives.

  • Once you have identified a key business initiative, then work with the key business leaders to identify, group, and prioritize the key decisions that the company leaders need to make in support of the business initiatives.
  • Consider the questions that must be answered in order for those executives to make the decisions, and identify the data sources that might be useful to the data collecting team for answering those types of questions.
  • Identify the support network and by enabling big data technologies, and platforms like E-commerce.

#3:  Do you use your leaders & millennials to the fullest potential for a cultural change from within your company?

It’s critical to the success of your transformation process to gain business leaders support and guidance from day one. The biggest challenge is always with the people in the company, and focusing on them, will yield biggest results overall.

    • Always think business first by identifying, validating, and prioritizing the data that supports the targeted business initiative. Focus on the “4 M’s of Company Data” Make Me More Money. Sounds selfish, but the end result is an enhanced consumer experience and increased revenues.
    • Set up workshops to brainstorm with the business leaders & the data sources that might yield better indications of performance. What business questions might we be able to answer in support of the key decisions, with various combinations of data?
  • Prioritize the user experience and start by focusing on a single or couple of case studies. If you don’t “Prioritize and Focus”, you will be forced to embrace a “Technology First” approach in order to try to satisfy all the case studies, which means that you’ll likely solve nothing. That is the wrong approach and will fail.

#4:  Do you understand the real value of your data collected and what the impact is on technology and business investments?

    • Traditional accounting with cost-based valuation minus depreciation for business assets is the wrong approach. The value that you paid for them, and the value goes down as the asset depreciates, or is “consumed”.
    • We needed a forward-looking way to determine the true value. We are embracing a methodology that uses a combination of economics and Data Science to determine the future or predictive value of data in optimizing the business case studies.
  • Data is the real Gold, and should be simple to interpret and read. Data really fuels the company and should never deplete.

#5:  Are you using E-commerce to expand your company’s revenue base online & economic value of your collected data?

Having this valuable data asset does no good if one can’t create an environment that exploits its potential. Pick a platform and maximize it’s potential.

  • Create a unique platform that fuels the on-going collaboration between the business and the data team managing it.
  • Implement data team, and ensure that proper data management services for example data, management, security, privacy, cataloging, indexing are implemented to preserve and maximize the value of the company’s data.
  • Build analytic profiles to ensure that the resulting analytics can be operationalized and that the company or business can leverage the value of the analytics right across the board.

Properly connecting data also allows you to think differently by taking advantage of the power of artificial intelligence and E-commerce— two of the most effective tools for in today’s new era of transformation, insights, and trends that are not yet obvious. Without real, measurable data, AI and machine learning are useless. Again, data is the Gold.


Embrace disruptive transformational process

The reality for transformational leaders today is that you can’t future-proof your business. The truth is, the pace of technological change is leading us into a period of rapid, continuous evolution. Half a century ago, the life expectancy of a firm on the Fortune 500 was about 75 years. Today it’s less than 15 years and declining further.

In a world where more disruptions are possible, there is a lot of opportunity. It’s what gave life to Singapore Post, and LUX Asia where I’m now CEO at. How you empower your employees, how you engage your customers, how you optimize your operations, mentor millennials, and transform company culture from within. People are the most important asset of all.

Is your company ready to embrace the new era of digital transformation? Or not?

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