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How Businesses Can Take The Digital Transformation Plunge: Start At The Beginning

How Businesses Can Take The Digital Transformation Plunge: Start At The Beginning

As part of a series on digital transformation, I’m sharing insight from Nigel Vaz, CEO of Publicis Sapient, and author of “Digital Business Transformation”. As the second article in a series (see the 10 attributes of successful transformation here), Vaz shares thoughts below on how to begin the daunting process of digital transformation.

Kimberly Whitler: How should companies think about digital transformation?

Nigel Vaz:The most important principle any business can internalize is that there is no end to transformation. Today, companies are facing changes on multiple, interrelated levels: from customer behavior and expectations to societal change, technological change, and new, disruptive business models. And this change will continue likely into perpetuity.  

What this means is that companies, and the people that make them up, have to constantly learn, unlearn, and relearn to remain competitive. Pre-pandemic, few business leaders were willing to acknowledge that critical success factors to their prior success were no longer fit for purpose. And, let’s face it, if you’ve built a successful business that’s lasted for decades (and some centuries), accepting that can be hard. This has since shifted as CEOs now recognize that digital business transformation could mean the difference between an organization surviving the next five years or not.

Would it not be a disaster if the only retailer in the world were Amazon, because they were the only company to figure out how to sell us everything? And if the only social community in the world were Facebook? Who wants to be in a place like that? We want those brands that we grew up with, that we appreciate and trust, to succeed by evolving to be relevant in the world today.

Whitler: What observations have you had as clients have been undergoing digital transformation?

Vaz: What’s been inspiring over the last few years, and certainly over the last year and a half, is seeing established businesses embrace the changes they’re seeing with their customers to create new business models and ways of working that meet their needs while leveraging the unique assets these companies and brands bring to bear. You need to look no further than companies like Disney, Marriott, and Domino’s to see incredible outcomes.

Whitler: How can companies get started?

Vaz: So, for any established business looking to inspire, start with what made you successful to begin with: understanding and meeting the needs of your customers, then bring your people and partners along with you as you envision what that can look like in a world and with a customer that’s digital.

Some years ago, we were in a conversation with the kind of client that I would describe as a classic change agent. We had worked with him in a number of roles at different companies and now he was working at a large British betting and gambling company. This company came to us having grown over more than a century but was now threatened by new competitors who were not only better at digital channels but were harnessing technology to create new models, namely peer-to-peer exchange betting.

Our client needed not only to improve its online experience to win back customers, but to go deep into its back-end technology in order to transform the product and service. The solution didn’t come from the betting industry at all but from our experience working with financial traders at global investments banks: proprietary technology that made process of odds being calculated by sports experts and providing a much wider range of in-play betting options.

It was the investment in the technology and trading systems that first gave us the opportunity to overlay it with improved online experience, and a new brand and advertising proposition. The excitement of many, many more live betting opportunities became something that was built into the web and mobile experience, with live odds even featuring in the company’s TV advertising, something only made possible by the upfront technological investment in its trading platform.

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