Elusive Success

If one element is missing, digital transformation falters. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, that happens all too often.

Those failures generally aren't the result of the technology or the platform, but rather the people involved and the execution. That's because execution must be aligned with vision for a business platform to succeed. And, if the stakeholders and leaders—from the bottom to top—aren't on board and in sync, the transformation journey can't succeed.

The People Challenge

No matter the industry or the company, the biggest challenge to digital transformation is people resistant to change. It's not the money or the investment or the time, says Gary McGeddy, President of C&F's Accident and Health division. “It's the resistance of Homo sapiens to change.”

People tend to like the way things have always been done. The old adage comes to mind, “If it ain't broke, don’t fix it.” These are the people who don't recognize the power that transformation—including digital—can bring to a company or even its applicability. Years into C&F's transformation and despite growth, there are still people in the company who argue that digital doesn't apply to their business model.

McGeddy's challenge certainly isn't unique (more later on how he's overcoming it). Typically, most companies have some people who aren't open to change or willing to try new approaches no matter how much easier the switch to digital can make their lives or how much benefit to a company, customers, or consumers.

Sometimes, though, as C&F and so many other companies can attest, people can be more receptive to change depending on how the change is implemented. The ancient Indian philosopher, statesman, and teacher Chanakya suggested that when someone eats a plate of hot food, it's best to not begin at the center. Rather, eat the food from the plate's outer edges first and the diner is less likely to burn their mouth on the food.²

The same can be said about innovation and change. Innovative complex changes can be implemented incrementally, a little bit at a time—from the outer edges as Chanakya suggests. Instead of massive upheaval and change all at once, introducing and implementing change incrementally often eases the transition and helps overcome resistance. Delivering the innovation on a familiar device, too, like a mobile phone or smart speaker, can make change more palatable and lessen any resentment or challenge to change.

A Tale of Two Businesses

Two Midwestern food management companies at about the same time decided to embrace digital transformation. Both initially believed in the potential of the business platform.

As the starting point on their journeys, each assessed where their company was on the path to digital maturity. One of the businesses had buy-in across the board by its people and stakeholders. The other business ran into Mr./Ms. Negative—individuals with their own personal agendas and not the best interests of the entire company paramount.

The company with the buy-in scored a rousing and successful transformation that doubled and later tripled growth that continues today. The other company's attempts at transformation came up short and the company eventually abandoned its initial goals.

Missing Culture Piece

A university in Leicester, England, wanted to improve on inefficiencies and inconsistencies across IT systems for its more than 20,000 students and staff.³ The goal was to create a platform that offered a better student experience. That included learning, teaching, research, and business operations across the university's various campuses that existed at the time. Plus, the university wanted a simple framework to move forward.

At the time the university's information technology systems were a decentralized hodgepodge collection of different operations and approaches in various locations. Specifically, the university wanted to integrate those siloed systems so that it could generate a common report to track students in the university system—everything from attendance and finance to library use, learning management, and so on.

That wasn't possible because all the different systems didn't even have a single way of defining how a student's name appeared in the various systems. So, the school's IT department along with its governing board, and with the backing of Steve Butcher, then Head of Procurement and Shared Services for the former Higher Education Funding Council for England, agreed to embrace development and implementation of a new business platform to do all that and more.

The platform was proven successful; the willingness for disruption/innovation was there. The university even had the funding in place. But the cultural mindset wasn't right. The leaders and stakeholders weren't in sync; among leadership, even one Mr./Ms. Negative can, and in this case did, torpedo the transformation. The people initially involved in the vision weren't part of the attempted execution, and without the original visionaries to follow through with the changeover, the project fizzled.

The concept was ahead of the market, says Paul Hopkins, then chief of the university's IT department and a proponent of the DOM. That was in the early 2010s, when British educators at disparate locations didn't fully grasp the potential of a business platform and weren't ready for the concept of separate yet compatible integrated systems across unique universities.

For new and different ideas to get off the ground, they need to come at the right time, says Hopkins.

Well said.

Another Case of Timing…

The timing wasn't right initially for digital transformation at Al Hilal Life either. Said Hathout, CEO of the Bahrain-based life insurance company, first pitched the concept of selling life insurance online to his board of directors in 2018. Traditionally, life insurance relies on in-person sales. In Bahrain, that's typically done in a bank through a bancassurance model where Al Hilal Life agents rely on walk-in bank customers to purchase policies.

Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, Hathout recognized that as more people relied on the internet and digital transactions, the insurance business needed to provide that experience, too, to remain competitive. In addition, as more consumers look to digital banking, that means fewer bank walk-ins and fewer potential insurance policy sales.

Despite all that, Al Hilal Life's overall direction at the time was not aligned with investing in online life insurance sales—an unproven sales model for a line of business that historically relies on face-to-face selling and direct interactions with customers. The timing simply wasn't right.

When It Works

Fast forward two years; COVID-19 grips the world, Bahrain included, and the few walk-ins at banks became scarce. So Hathout as well as the Al Hilal Life board realized this was a life-or-death situation where it was clear that even if Al Hilal Life rides out this pandemic, people will not go back to the old ways, so eventually the company needs to do online sales.

They decided to proceed, and not just with online life insurance sales. Instead, Al Hilal Life's board and management opted to disrupt. That meant offering online personally tailored products with immediate coverage and no in-person meetings.

Al Hilal Life and its technology partners had to not only develop self-service tools, but also leverage the digital platform to generate referrals, the lifeline in life insurance, says Hathout. That meant taking a legacy mindset/culture and transforming it. “Technology was not really the biggest challenge,” says Hathout, “It was the learning process. I'm not really a technology nerd. What I learned in the last months is more than my entire life. It's a nice journey to go through, frustrating sometimes, but eventually when you start to see the actual results begin to materialize you find out it is worth it.”

When the transformation began only a few people in the company backed Hathout's plan. Today it's a far different story. Nearly everyone in the company changed their mentality when they saw what can be done with digital (the platform effect). “We have made the digital process flawless without any kind of paper, very quick and simple,” he says. “We are trying to be the first company in Bahrain with life insurance totally online. Today we have 10% market share of $300 million in U.S. dollars. Tomorrow I hope to grow that market to perhaps 10% of $1 billion by expanding that market.”

A Great Idea Hits Snags

LifeNexus Inc. was a company that in 2009 came up with the iChip, a personalized microchip embedded in a plastic card. Just like the bank cards with chipped personal identification information that nearly all of us have now, the concept was for a chipped card that was a key that could be authenticated and connect with someone's personal health data on the Cloud. The thinking was that a person shouldn't have to recall all their health data whenever they visit a healthcare provider or go to a hospital.

Revolutionary at the time, the chip had the ability to disrupt the healthcare space. The company and its innovators even had formal Series A funding. Remember, the university in Leicester, England, that had the idea to disrupt its space also had funding, but implementation fizzled? The health-data chip fizzled, too, because rather than embrace the innovation, exploit it, and move forward, the company's leaders tried to make it fit into the existing system. It was the square peg in the round hole stymied by a culture unwilling to disrupt the status quo. The technology was there but the healthcare ecosystem wasn't ready to fully embrace the transformation for a number of reasons, including data privacy concerns.

LifeNexus eventually filed for bankruptcy protection in 2016 and another company, OrangeHook Inc., bought its assets.

Two other similar health information–related platforms—Google Health and Microsoft Health Vault—also didn't take off. However, a third, more recent platform for personalized consumer health records, Apple Health, that works as an app on your iPhone may have a better future.⁴

New and Better

There's more. Before someone rolls their eyes at the idea of culture as crucial to digital transformation, think again. A solid product or service is no longer enough for customers or consumers.

Customers do business with a company today because of the authenticity and transparency of its people. This is an era that demands openness and a visible mindset. Saying, “I'm the best,” doesn't cut it. Continuous growth and improvement—working harder to get better every day—is what counts.

In many companies, the culture is the missing piece. Some people may be stuck in the past and not ready for the change or the speed and fluidity of digital. They could be satisfied with the existing system, no matter how cumbersome or inadequate.

At the university in Leicester, England, the original visionaries were no longer on board and, therefore, couldn't spearhead and promote the new platform model, so the execution came up short and transformation didn't happen. Transformation worked at Al Hilal Life, because the initial champion of digital, Said Hathout, spearheaded the change and a dedicated team of believers made it happen.

Three Elements Aligned

Another United Kingdom–based university was more receptive to welcome the DOM. The University of West London now and into the future “leverages the synergies that technology gives us, says Peter John, Ph.D., UWL Vice Chancellor and Chief Executive.

That wasn't always the case, however. In the early 2010s, the university was a languishing educational institution. At the time, everyone figured it was one of those universities that will never really be any good or succeed, says Adrian Ellison, UWL Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor and Chief Information Officer.

Numbers don't lie. In the early 2010s, UWL ranked 122 in The Guardian University Guide. The university now ranks 35th in the 2022 Guardian list.⁵ To put those numbers in perspective, there were 164 total universities in the UK in 2019.⁶ The university almost doubled its income, too, says Ellison.

What happened to turn the tide? One big contributor was that the university's vice chancellor had the foresight and bold leadership savvy to recognize the potential of technology and leverage the digital platform to usher in change, says Ellison. The vice chancellor made digital a key pillar of strategy. The IT director—Ellison—then and now reports directly to the vice chancellor. That's not traditionally been the norm in business.

Absolute measures of success were established, too. One of those measures is IT performance and includes service delivery to satisfaction levels based on a national metric, says Ellison.

The culture and innovation piece. The results of this essential digital leadership have been stunning. The university completely transformed everything from rebuilding its physical campus to changing the curriculum and how it operates.

It's also about people, culture, and executive-level support, says Ellison. “You can have the best digital leader but if you don't take the people or the organization with you, you will never deliver much.”

When Ellison joined UWL in 2012, he says, they wanted to put in a new student business platform—a portal where a student could access everything they needed to help them through their academic journey. It would be a virtual university space where students could connect with others; have a collaboration space to work on projects; track attendance, grades, library use, fees, and so on; attend events; and much more. The goal was to leverage the power of existing technology tools—in this case Microsoft Office 365 and the Cloud—to create a better experience for students.

Stakeholder commitment. With top-level university commitment, the help of an external technology partner, and the buy-in of students, the changeover was a huge success. “One of the things I did was to get our student union involved right from the very beginning,” says Ellison. “Getting the user community on board is half the battle.”

UWL combined commitment to the right platform with a strong culture, and innovation—leveraging existing tools—for a win, win, win then, now, and into the future.

That early stakeholder buy-in is crucial to the success of any new platform in a business. After all, digital transformation is not about implementing the latest and greatest technology; it's about making people's lives better, easier, and more streamlined.

The Mindset Piece

Are objections by your people or your customers grounded in fact? Even if in a small way, it's important to listen to all the stakeholders who will benefit from the digital platform. Their objections or concerns could deal with people, platform, or innovation. Has your company really thought through its digital journey? What's the primary driver of revenue for your company? Is it internal as in manufacturing a product or providing an on-site service? Or is it external schools and institutions? Do you know the primary driver of customer experience? Do you have a mechanism in place to continuously measure customer satisfaction levels and make necessary improvements? Answering these questions helps a company develop a digital mindset, which is foundational to the DOM journey.

The University of West London had the buy-in of all stakeholders from the vice-chancellor and CEO to the student body and digital transformation succeeded overwhelmingly because its people had the right mindset and were ready for transformation. And it's not over yet. In fact, John and his team are looking to the future and more than just technology. “We can't be the master–servant relationship with technology. It can't be that tech is the master and we serve it. It must be the opposite. Technology must serve the communities, the staff, and there must be buy-in. There was buy-in at the top, but now buy-in has to distribute down in order for us to become the kind of university we want to be—the impact university,” says John.

Before transformation, Crum & Forster, like many traditional insurance companies, had a linear or waterfall mindset. Remember, that's sequential operations and completing one task at a time, one application or one operation at a time. But with the switch, things changed, especially the timing.

Decentralization helped to untap the potential of people across the company. What emerged is a culture that enables people to embrace an agile, parallel track–thinking mindset—accelerating C&F's speed to market. (More later on the C&F story.)

This further confirms the importance of the culture element of the DOM—the right people in the right structure can unlock high performance.

Authenticity, Trust, and Transparency

Do you use 20 words or one word to describe and connect with your people? If it's the latter, good for you; you're on your way to the clarity and trust necessary for digital transformation. If 20 words is a better description of how you connect, it may be time to rethink your company's plans on how to compete today.

That's because trust defines today's digital culture. Trust is especially important when digital is the connection and it's not possible for everyone to sit together in a room. The COVID-19 lockdown era of forced trust proved that. Many businesses continued successful operations amid lockdown and even experienced unprecedented growth.

Another widespread workplace revelation of the COVID-19 era is trust equals speed. Instead of dozens of people having to sign off on an action, the circumstances of the lockdown led companies to operate leaner, more agile operations.

The concept of trust equals speed in the workplace certainly isn't new. Some successful companies and their leaders have known about that for years.

Effective Communication

With trust comes transparency and more effective communication, too. Instead of companies holding an all-hands meeting once a year, today's digital-empowered companies look to daily and weekly huddles to keep everyone informed and up to speed to make the very most of processes, time, and efforts. That's clarity.

When work from home became the mandate in 2020, Global Furniture Group USA sent its people home. To stay connected, daily digitally enabled team meetings became the norm. Every manager had his entire team on the Microsoft Teams app every day at 8 a.m., says COO Ari Asher. “You almost say, ‘Wow, this is normal.’ But that wasn't the case; we never did this before.”

“COVID helped us restructure how we interact with teams with the help of digital tools that we continue to benefit from,” says Asher. The meetings continue, though they have dropped back to several times a week, he says.

Connectivity today doesn't simply mean everyone is online or has access to the internet; it's about communication, collaboration, and camaraderie. Individuals and teams overcome big challenges by breaking them down into smaller ones and dealing with them one step at a time. All these pieces are part of the digital operating model. We're all connected, and all part of the solutions and innovations that bubble up and make the once thought impossible possible.

During the pandemic, C&F experimented with a variety of methods to stay connected with their people. While their decentralized model and digital platform made the transition to the work-from-home world relatively seamless, the C&F management team wanted to keep people informed during an uncertain time—and make them feel connected even while they were working out of their homes.

One of the more popular communications was a weekly Friday check-in note in which Marc Adee started to keep everyone in the loop with respect to all things COVID. Once Adee ran out of pandemic news, the notes evolved to cover a range of business topics including company results, new ventures, and technical aspects of business or career strategies, and also veered into personal anecdotes. “Most of my stories have some relation to a business theme, but some are just for fun to show that CEOs are regular people, too,” says Adee.

“The check-ins kind of accidentally turned out to be a great way for me to connect with employees at all levels,” he says. “The pandemic made me realize that we had really optimized our culture around our large offices—and that left some people feeling left out. Now I feel more connected to all of our people.”

C&F's successful culture goes beyond technology. Says Adee, “There are scenarios that could interrupt our technology—but even as we consider these as realistic disaster scenarios, I believe we would figure something out. That's just part of our culture. When something throws us for a loop, we'll work out a solution. If we get too stuck in our ways, that's probably not going to be the case.”

POD: The Right Internal Systems

Agility is essential for a company to have successful and sustainable exponential growth, especially in today's rapidly evolving digitally demanding world. A POD internal structure provides that.

POD is not an acronym; it's the name of a self-contained business unit with all the required elements to deliver the scale necessary for growth today—self-operating, self-governing, and self-managing. Too often companies with traditional top-down business operating models—especially large companies—can't deal with the demands of scale in today's marketplace.

In other words, instead of the traditional dependent business units like finance, sales, human resources, development, and so on functioning as one big multilayered business unit, PODs operate as empowered minimum viable business units. Each can leverage the business, earn money, and budget and control expenses.

Project beginnings. The POD model began as fluid units to maximize potential of a particular project large or small.⁷ But they've broadened and evolved to this new POD model that creates a magnifying glass to easily examine and execute the various elements of your business, and maximize product and services delivery to your customers.

POD also maximizes internal communications so that your employees can commit, collaborate, and communicate effectively. Consider how insurance giant C&F decentralized operations and transformed.

Lego-like building blocks. Think of one POD as one Lego building block and a group of PODs as multiple elements that work together to create a sound structure. Companies today need these small independent units because the world is changing so quickly. Small units can pivot much more quickly than large cumbersome ones, thus reacting to market shifts and demands swiftly, smoothly, and easily.

Unlike a siloed business structure, PODs have freedom and empowerment and the ability to leverage the potential of the company. Each POD is integrated into and can access and utilize the power of the business platform. Each has a playbook that yields the desired outcome when everyone follows the cadence.

Delivering growth. The POD structure is designed for growth tomorrow, especially when combined with a RACI matrix. (RACI is an acronym for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.) A RACI matrix is a charting system that details the who and what in terms of goals, actions, and responsibilities for project completion. It's designed to cut out confusion, deliver accountability, and improve efficiencies and deliverables.

This intentional workflow mechanism is crucial for companies to maintain the forward momentum of exponential growth without sacrificing data, processes, and experience internally or externally for the customers.

The C&F approach. The aim of decentralization at C&F was to increase innovation, reduce project cycle time, strengthen ownership and accountability, build greater engagement and efficiency, and overall better serve the customer, says Tom Bredahl, President of C&F's Surplus and Specialty division.

By decentralizing as many resources and capabilities as possible, C&F inverted decision-making and ownership of every function possible that heretofore had resided at the corporate level and repositioned them “closer to the ground,” says Bredahl, “either within our comprising divisions, or even lower by embedding them within sub-segments within divisions.”

“The manifestation of this approach was felt nowhere more acutely than within our digital team. We cut dependencies on our centralized corporate hierarchy for virtually all aspects of our operation save for cyber-security and financial reporting. We shifted from a fairly strict, federalist central bureau to a collection of autonomous division states with only a light layer of coordinating services at the top,” he says.

“The impact was immediate and positive,” continues Bredahl, “even with the expected hiccups from so drastic a change. Gone were the days of waiting months or years for system or process changes. Divisions built or bought what they needed to best serve their particular need. What about redundant cost? What about consistency and compatibility? Challenges for sure, but less problematic than expected.”

“Apart from the improvements in our overall performance and delivery, we experienced an additional change that was impactful yet subtle. Morale greatly improved. The typical relationship strains and challenging attitudes among our hard-working and well-meaning developer corps seemed to dissipate. We became a team more in sync with each other. We were now more interested in achieving shared goals than in self-promotion or casting ‘blame’ on others for deficiencies. We still have challenges, but we now have an infrastructure that smells like action, with a team eager to tackle any challenge,” adds Bredahl.

Such is the power of the POD.

Experience, Process, Data

In addition to the three components essential to digital transformation, companies must know their customers' and employees' experiences, know the processes in the business, and know their data. And then, know how each of those building blocks relates to the various elements of digital transformation. Know all that and you're on your way to success.

Simplified. That's a lot to know and understand. But it's not quite so complex when you consider experience, data, and process in a different context. Let's say you decide to go out for sushi. You have two choices. One upscale, expensive restaurant a block away to the north costs $200 a person. Another small somewhat hole-in-the-wall spot is a block to the south and costs $20 a person. Both have good sushi, so what's the difference in terms of data, process, and experience? The food is the data; the recipe is the process; and the way the food is presented is the experience.

Upscale high-end restaurant serves one small piece of sushi on a big plate and brings 20 plates one after the other. Every bite of sushi is an experience and a memory artistically presented on the plate. It's how the people serve and greet diners, the ambience, and the total experience. Only the finest ingredients—the data—are used. Every bite is designed and curated. That's called delivering food experience.

Hole-in-the-wall, on the other hand, brings out one big plate with different kinds of sushi piled on it. The sushi is tasty, but it's not the same memorable experience.

Similarly, in terms of a business, you can deliver memorable value to customers with the power of a digital operating model that aligns data, process, and experience, and you can command value-based pricing with that. This DOM approach delivers scalability and value and sets a business on the pathway to exponential growth.

One-Stop Shop

Building your business as a platform enables employees, leadership, and customers access to all their needs in one place.

With a large milk cooperative, for example, everything is in one place on the platform—from reusable, reconfigurable assets to customer information, shipping, production, human resources, pricing, and more. Similarly, your customers have their multiple needs from your business organized for easy access and control in one convenient, accessible location—on the platform.

Whatever the size of a company, when it transforms from siloed, disjointed operations into an integrated platform the business performs more efficiently. It's better positioned to deliver better services—experiences—to a greater number of customers today and into the future without disruption or a complete systems overhaul.

When It Works…

A digital platform doesn't have to mean tossing out all of a company's legacy systems, which hold important historical data that can be valuable to data analytics. With the right platform, it's possible to leverage existing systems to bring about faster, digital experiences for customers and consumers without building entirely new systems.

A leading U.S. newspaper needed to streamline its classified and display advertising business. The newspaper already had a strong web presence in some of its operations but no mechanism to leverage the internet for its classified and display advertising. The company and its culture had embraced digital and innovation, but the business platform—the third axis—until now was missing in the advertising realm.

Instead, the newspaper's advertising department relied on processes that combined people manually taking orders for ads over the telephone with technologically varied in-house–developed systems to funnel ads from partner ad agencies to its mainframe system. Management wanted to improve customer and consumer experiences through better processes and data management while still maintaining control over ad content printed in the paper. The solution was a digital operating model that leveraged the internet to generate additional ad revenue and provide users a more do-it-yourself approach.

Now the basic reservation process for display advertising space and ad placement is automated. The advertising material is delivered electronically, interfacing with the newspaper's internal production systems. Also centralized is registration and resolution of billing inquiries while providing the newspaper with contract and historical information—data—that allows better management of its business and its customers. Further enhancing control over its data, the newspaper also now has ad lifecycle management and billing online and provides its customers an online system to buy classified advertising products.

A large U.S. milk cooperative also experienced challenges with its existing system operations. Problems included data accuracy as well as speed, downtime, ticket resolution, and security. Business processes, customer experience, and data management all were affected.

So, to enhance its processes, customer experience, and make the most use of its data, the company chose to embrace the DOM and a new Cloud-based digital platform. With its implementation, the cooperative cut costs by 25%; resolved complaints 30% faster; provided 99% system uptime, and enhanced the company's data by offering easy access to system monitoring. And more good news: the new business platform also incorporated existing applications and infrastructure for additional cost savings.

Digital Drives Diversity

The right business platform makes a difference in the nonprofit realm, too. The National GEM Consortium (Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science, Inc.) opted to embrace a DOM and saw growth hit new levels. Founded in 1976, the group's GEM Fellowship program promotes participation of underrepresented minorities in post-graduate applied science, technology, and engineering education.

STEM training. A big reason for lack of minorities in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) workforce goes back to the common belief that the talent wasn't available or, if it was out there, employers say they couldn't find the talent, says Brennon Marcano, GEM CEO. The consortium helps find and place minority talent in advanced learning programs. With the help of business platform technology—DOM—it's also developing a database that employers can turn to for access to talent.

Companies must validate recruitment costs, especially at a time when money is tight and programs like diversity often are the first to suffer cutbacks. The business platform enables transactional activity—data—to be turned into knowledge so that it can be readily available and preemptive.

“We have been producing the best and the brightest talent who happen to be diverse as well,” says Marcano. Now, we take away the logistical excuses companies use—claims they can't find diverse talent—so that an employer simply logs into the business platform, lists its needs, and can access the database of qualified talent. “We always had the talent; where we struggled was with demand and a lack of awareness of the talent.”

Before the DOM, just accessing GEM's content online was cumbersome and confusing for potential fellowship applicants as well as employers that sought qualified job candidates. For example, a student who wanted to fill out a fellowship application had to click on 13 different screens.

After implementing a new platform—what Marcano refers to as GEM 2.0—access is streamlined and convenient for students as well as employers. Already the DOM has helped GEM triple in size over the past five years, placing nearly 500 students and working with 128 universities and 60 corporate partners, he says.

Supersize for the future. Marcano has big plans to supersize the program in the future, too. He would like the database to become an aggregator of talent. There's no reason why technology can't drive the challenge of diversity. “We can do it on a small scale, so why not a larger version—perhaps on National Science Foundation level.”

He envisions making use of data science capabilities and to develop this supersized centralized database of GEM's 40 years of the best and brightest alumni that, again, happen to be diverse. The business platform will enable an employer to list its needs and instantly be matched up with qualified candidates. Instead of just one candidate, they will be able to access a list of qualified candidates with diversity. It's a win, win, win for all parties.

A platform that can connect education with minorities and companies with diverse talent actually minimizes the divide between the privileged and those who are not in all countries. It delivers access and makes equality possible. The digital operating model is not just for the privileged. It's for everyone.

Built-in Road Map

With a business platform in place, a company, like the nonprofit GEM, also has a built-in road map for the future. As markets dictate the need for a shift/upgrade in operations or delivery of product and services, it's plug and play—or unplug and move on—with new services and systems. That's as opposed to the traditional approach that usually required purchasing new software or systems and hoping they could be configured to work with the existing systems. (Often, they weren't compatible.)

Instead, the new application or software is simply added to the digital platform; all things connect smoothly without service interruptions and in the right order. That instant and across-the-board capability is especially valuable when team members are in varying locations and a work-from-home scenario. A company doesn't have to worry if everyone is on board and whether the changes will be smooth.

With the digital road map, the possibilities are endless. It's a continuous maturity model in which a company with the right platform or platforms sets new goals, achieves them, and does it again and again, all with the same scalable platform.

Amid the COVID-19 lockdown, a local, primarily in-person New York–based copy shop struggled to survive. With a minimal, not always reliable online presence, the company's future seemed bleak. But then its owner woke up to the business potential of the right digital operating model. Embracing a digital platform that could deliver quality copies, enhanced customer experiences, and dependable service online turned the economic tables for the company. In just one year, the company's business soared 40% above pre-pandemic levels.

Intelligent Platform

As the copy shop, GEM Consortium, Al Hilal Life, and so many others found out, the digital operating model offers a bonus. Data is the foundation of intelligence, and when combined with process fluidity and an ability to cater to different types of customers, the three can work together as an intelligent platform. Then a business can utilize high-powered analytics to help predict outcomes and prevent slipups, misinformation, and misdirection.

That means, among other things, a more scientific and less error-prone approach to purchasing, product or service promotions, product design, upgrades, product and service tracking, staffing, customer relationship management, and human resource functions.

Imagine the cost savings for a business with more consistent and accurate ordering and supply purchases, staffing to meet real needs as opposed to estimated needs, and consumer-based design instead of only thinking something might be a good idea. And compare that precision growth, change, marketing, and development to what's happening with the competition. Most likely they're busy reacting to market needs and product design changes. Digital platforms provide the competitive edge.

Changing Processes, Too

A part of Al Hilal Life's rapid digital transformation success lies in the company and its people's relatively quick understanding that rigidity and siloed processes don't directly translate into the business platform model. In other words, the business side of things was ready for the technology and transformation.

“I have learned to let go of a lot of things,” says Said Hathout. “Simplicity is the key. We are not putting our current processes into digital; it's not copy and paste. This is not the purpose of the digital transformation. We came up with new processes.”

Those new processes powered by a digital platform ecosystem are working. Hathout says the company projects about a 15% increase in sales with the digital operating model. More importantly, the referral impact of digital data mining is huge. Whereas today the company may get 100 referrals via traditional channels, with the digital platform and tools those numbers rise to 200 to 300 referrals, says Hathout.

In the past, he says, referrals meant an Excel spreadsheet with 5,000 to 6,000 names and no one would accurately know the outcomes of those referrals and whether they were properly targeted. “Today with our lead management software, we can distribute those leads and properly track outcomes. We can mine the outcomes and expand targeted marketing.”

Endless Possibilities

Platform technology also has the scalability to allow the exponential growth necessary today to disrupt and dominate markets. Whitsons Culinary Group, the New York–based food service management company, took the end-to-end business platform approach and transformed its operations and its business.

Once a hodgepodge of operations that mixed manual and digital functions, today Whitsons is a streamlined 100% digital operating model. That move allowed the company to dramatically increase the number of customers it serves while maintaining the same number of employees. To scale like that without the platform, Whitsons would have had to double the size of its workforce. Not only is the switch a huge cost savings, but a robust digital platform also enables the company to offer more and better services for its customers.

Additionally, the change in the company's business model has a positive societal impact. Thanks to enhanced digital data management, consumers can get a clear understanding of the nutritional value of various foods their clients offer that can lead to better eating habits. As mentioned earlier, Whitsons now has a mobile application that empowers parents to select their children's daily meals with full nutritional value information in mind. This product guarantees customized choices for children's school meals, with the opportunity to contribute to healthier families.

Fluidity

Like Whitsons, businesses today also must be nimble and able to change direction quickly as markets dictate to maintain a competitive advantage. With Cloud accessibility available via platform, it's simple to add a new capability, delete something old, or upgrade to the latest and greatest, whatever and whenever it's needed and all without disruptions to the existing system or massive expenses.

Think of the Cloud as an internet-enabled repository of information, operations, and systems that can help your business run more smoothly, keep your customers happier, and help your employees work smarter. A platform that's Cloud-ready doesn't compromise your data or your business; it sets the stage for efficiencies and growth.

Without Cloud platform readiness, be prepared to be disrupted by your competition.

Risk and Failures

Taking risks and accepting failures is essential. In fact, innovation is built on the ability to fail fast because the failures foster creativity and can lead to new solutions to old and new challenges. In other words, the goal is to quickly determine if an idea holds value without burning an extraordinary amount of money or time.

Those people who quit after one or two misses—or more—aren't ready for innovation. Those who persist, who use knowledge and experience to overcome failures, are the great innovators.

Accepting mistakes, learning from them, and moving on is one of the requisite ingredients within the intentionality formula for creating a culture of success, says David Granson of Goldman Sachs. That's why, he says, he tries to foster a blameless culture. “We know mistakes will be made, but if we don't learn from mistakes, continuously dwell on them, and instead wag a finger at someone, we'll never get their mind. They'll never learn to always be intellectually curious. They will be afraid to dig deeper and you can't let that fester in a team either because the world is too competitive.”

Consider that prolific inventor Thomas Edison said of his failed attempts, “I have not failed 10,000 times; I've successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”⁸

If Edison's optimism doesn't sway those who doubt the importance of failure on the path to innovation, consider that long before Apple became a household word, its co-founder Steve Wozniak five times offered his employer Hewlett–Packard his first computer design. That design eventually became the Apple 1 personal computer.⁹

Attitude and Approach

Apparently, H–P at the time wasn't ready for the innovation. When is a company ready? At least when we're talking about digital transformation, the answer stems from what digital is all about—speed.

If it still takes your people 10 days to complete a process, your company isn't ready for digital. But, if your teams continually generate new ideas, suggest new innovations, and take lots less time to do the same job than last week, last month, or last year, they're becoming digitally savvy and ready for the advantages, new experiences, and exponential growth that digital can offer.

Innovation Lab

Innovation is all about ideas—some good, some not so good, and some absolutely great on paper until reality sets in. In tech jargon, it's known as ideation. For many companies, the abundance of so much innovation is happening around them so fast that it's all overwhelming. No one knows where to start in terms of digital change so nothing happens.

Safe place for thought. A great way for a company of any size to avoid overwhelming employees and foster innovation is to create an innovation lab—a place or space where people can try, trade, and develop new ideas quickly. An innovation lab can be about more than technology, too. It's about process innovation as well.

Here are a few solid tips to foster a positive environment:

• Leave the emotion out of the ideas.
• Stay unattached to those ideas.
• Keep moving forward.

Also essential are time limits on ideas—perhaps one to four weeks to develop an idea. In the jargon, that's a maximum of two sprints—one sprint equals two weeks. Build the concept, try it fast, and if it doesn't work, forget it, and move on. If something takes longer, it's no longer an idea; it's a project. Ideas are just that; projects have a beginning and an end.

That's what IndiaFirst Life was doing more than a decade ago at its own technology innovation lab—the Octopus Room. It was staffed by bright young minds tasked with developing new ideas and new ways of doing things, according to Vishakha R M, now the company's Managing Director and CEO. Anything that didn't produce quick results was dropped and the teams moved on to something else.

Driving ideation. Think of an innovation lab as a microcosm of innovation in a specific environment intent on driving ideation. It's a place where people collaborate and provoke thinking that generates a pipeline of ideas and seeds of ideas. One long-time innovation expert describes what happens with ideas in an innovation lab as like throwing darts at a wall and seeing which stick. Not every idea is suited for innovation.

Innovation teams should be small and made up of people focused on innovation and agility, and who understand the model for action. A company's culture needs to promote this kind of creative thinking.

You don't know yet what you don't know. In other words, if a company doesn't have the right data, it can't know what's missing. In the absence of the right data, rather than try to exploit existing systems, companies need to look to outside data and new ideas to implement change.

The capability to analyze and deliver clear and current data is yet another reason why business platforms are so essential in our fast-shifting business environment today.

Formal programs. Innovation is an important element in the DOM model for the future of business. Many small and mid-size companies rush to launch new and innovative ideas on their own. In contrast, big companies create innovation labs or promote entrepreneurship programs with different channels.

Companies including Mastercard and Comcast NBC Universal have formal programs to encourage innovative ideas and businesses. Mastercard's Start Path is a global startup engagement program that helps innovative, fintech later-stage startups scale. The program has been around since 2014 and helped more than 250 startups. New in 2021 is a version of Start Path dedicated to helping companies in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space,¹⁰ and Strive, a program from Mastercard's Center for Inclusive Growth, which is designed to support micro and small businesses to digitize.¹¹

Comcast's formal incubator program is The Farm. In essence, it's an innovation lab where groups of young companies have a set period of time to work on ideas. At the end of the mentorship, Comcast may invest in some of the companies.

Plenty of other companies, economic development agencies, and public and private organizations as well offer formal business incubators. Whatever the program, however, always thoroughly research it first before getting involved.

POV versus POC

Also important to the innovation process is the pursuit of proof of value (POV) rather than the more formal proof of concept (POC). Proof of concept simply shows whether or not a proposed idea, approach, product, or whatever actually performs as promised. We don't see if the concept will succeed or fail when implemented in a business.

Proof of value, on the other hand, determines whether an idea, approach, or product actually delivers value in the context of a real business setting—how it can improve a product or process in the real world, for example. We see real working solutions with real business data and processes.

Let's say the new idea is about delivering faster and better customer service as measured by the time it takes to answer a call. If a company averages 90 seconds to answer a call, that means with POC, a call answered in 60 seconds is a win. But POV involves identifying the actual benefits to the customer and in turn the company. For example, even though a call was answered quicker, was the customer satisfied with the solution?

Minimum Viable Concept

Also important in the innovation process is the idea of putting together a minimum viable product that is then tested on a limited basis—what's known as a sandbox environment—using real company data and real problems. Then, based on feedback, the idea or proposed solution is either scraped or further refined and developed before a formal rollout.

For example, when Quest Foods wanted to buy a culinary digital backend platform, they evaluated various products, selected one, and then had the product vendor test it in this sandbox environment. Within a limited environment, Quest's real users tested the product customized with Quest's data and its rules and regulations to determine how well it operated within the company's system. It wasn't simply a product demonstration; it was about seeing how well the product worked within an end-to-end lifecycle of the business.

A New Approach

Doing business today is different than in the past. Before digital became the norm, business strategies called for identifying markets and customers or what product offerings provided the greatest bottom-line benefit. Even a business's discussions about its culture were structured and based on the bottom line.

Now, with less physical and more virtual interaction in terms of people and markets, the hybrid model of the work environment, and the changing dynamics of the workforce, company strategies and cultures must change, too. That means, as mentioned, less compartmentalized operations, more transparency and clarity, heightened communications, and greater agility. Today's strategies must be linked with the customer's digital experience and culture must be aligned with the agile mindset.

Execution eats strategy for lunch.

That's the new mantra in our growing digital environment. If a company's structure isn't robust, its strategies go nowhere. A robust structure marries digital systems into a platform or platforms that in turn gives clarity, transparency, and direction for a complete and clear view of a business and its operations. The entire business process is mapped into the platform with execution driven by data and KPI (key performance indicators) metrics.

Fluidity

The DOM provides the platform as well as the fluidity necessary to excel in today's competitive environment in which customers and markets change constantly. Businesses must have the capability to adapt to survive.

Think of a business today in terms of an amoeba—a self-contained organism that continues to change shape as it moves forward. With a platform ecosystem in place, a business can easily adapt its processes. It's plug and play with minimal effort moving forward. Like the amoeba, change becomes smooth and efficient.

Before you think that's a stretch, consider these shape-shifting examples. Lodging was a thriving industry with different hotel chains as well as condo/house lodging options. All coexisted. But then Airbnb took off and disrupted the industry. Lodging companies had two choices: do nothing or react. Some chose the latter, expanded partnerships with other hotels and resort chains, and created their own versions of Airbnb.

Or look at taxi companies in major metropolitan areas. Rideshare companies that utilize Cloud-sharing platform technologies disrupted the industry. Suddenly, curbside pickup, door-to-door service, and instant access took on new meaning in transportation. Now it's no longer enough for the taxis that are left to drive the streets looking for fares or wait for the telephone calls. Taxi services must change shape and adapt their services to meet consumer demand and move forward or disappear.