The human side of digital transformation: Shaping consumer demand with business capabilities

Part 1: Shaping Consumer Demand with Business Capabilities

This is the first of a three-part series explaining the human contribution within a digital strategy. From a foundational perspective, digital transformation is the application of digital capabilities to processes and products for improving efficiency, enhancing customer value, managing risk, and uncovering new opportunities for service improvement. The facilitation of digital capabilities is not enabled by either process or technology but rather by the culture of the greater organization. Culture serves as the true operating system of your organization and is a critical success factor for digital transformation; if we do not address the influence of the human element, lasting change will not happen. In this blog series, we will take a deeper look at the human efforts associated with creating the required governance and consumer-provider relationship management models that sets the foundation for digital transformation.

Business Capability Modeling

The role of the provider is to offer value added services that consumers are willing to pay for. To deliver these services requires the provider to dedicate the concentration of its people, process, and supporting technology to meeting the needs of the consumer. This requires the provider to develop a model for the facilitating actions which produce a desired outcome otherwise known as a business capability.

An effective provider organization is one that continuously realigns its business capabilities to deliver on the needs of the consumer. The provider organization needs to monitor when consumer demand changes and then take the necessary steps to respond as a team. This focus centers on the following variables:

• Consumer Profiling: Defining a consumer profile helps the provider to identify the pattern of business activity for the targeted demographic and potential areas of opportunity
• Competition: Identifying the number of competitors is one component; however, being aware of known advantages that can result in the loss of consumers is another
• Location: Knowing where the consumer is located allows the provider to define the scope of and perspective on how to interpret and fulfill demand
• Legal & Governance Regulation: Understanding if a service needs to comply with legal and/or industry standards can influence how and for whom the service is developed and delivered

Breaking Down Workplace Silos

Within the traditional workplace model, the response to changes in consumer demand was often left to the devices of individual departments. The result of this approach produced individual silos among the organization where departments worked hard to produce outcomes that fell short of fulfilling the demands of the consumer.

In the digital world, the provider views its delivery of capabilities via teamwork, not segregated activities that are performed by individual groups. Regardless of placement within the organization, different business capability areas should view their fellow staff members as partners where everyone plays a role in defining a culture of communication and cooperation to successfully produce a service.

In Part II of this series, we will transition our focus to how operational governance can effectively influence the delivery of business capabilities by providing a use case example of how best to introduce robotic process automation (RPA) into a provider based culture.