NC1701

FEATUREDIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION:
THE MOBILITY CATALYST
KIA BEHNIA, CEO OF POWWOW MOBILE, EXPLAINS WHY A
SUCCESSFUL DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PROGRAM STARTS AND
FINISHES WITH ESTABLISHING A MOBILE-FIRST CULTURE
The rise of digital transformation
signifies a massive cultural shift
within organisations where changes
to the way that business is done and how
customers, partners and employees are
served, is fundamentally shifting. Digital
transformation is comprised of many
components including, for example, cloud
and IoT adoption: but it is mobility that is
the catalyst for the major shift in the way
organisations will operate in future. As
such, any enterprise seeking to truly
transform their mindset to digital first must
begin by implementing a mobile-first
strategy.
WHO OWNS THE MOBILE
STRATEGY?
As digital transformation mindsets are
adopted by organisations, many teams are
unsure whose role it is to implement this
fundamental operational change. The Line
of Business (LOB) team is often frustrated
because they feel they can't move as fast
as their competitive marketplace, while IT
simply feels overwhelmed with many
important responsibilities beyond
mobilisation. As a result, mobility priorities
have sometimes created unhelpful friction
between the two.
In recent years, many organisations have
established a third division - a corporate
innovation group or mobile centre of
excellence (MCoE) that is tasked to
research, and sometimes build, new
technologies that can be leveraged to
streamline business productivity and
efficiency. However, these teams have
traditionally been granted all of the
responsibility but none of the authority. It
is probably too early to tell whether or not
the corporate innovation department or
MCoEs can eliminate this IT-LOB friction.
In the meantime, organisations striving for
a transformative approach must bring
these three disparate business units
together to add accountability, authority
and cohesiveness to their mobile journey.
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY CULTURE:
ESSENTIAL TO DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION
Digital transformation does not happen
from the bottom up and should be driven
from the top down. To be a digital
enterprise, CIO's must focus on leading
change and moving beyond a cost centre,
to a centre of excellence in which
employees and customers have access to
the technology that improves their
experiences.
Most organisations do not yet have their
applications and workflows accessible
using mobile devices, but identifying areas
of improvement is easy - prioritising them
is hard. Any mobile strategy must therefore
begin with a staged roadmap that can
provide concrete value to the business. To
begin with, it's worth looking at the endto-end
business processes and mobilising
the key workflows. In most cases, the new
mobile apps will be small byte-sized
functions that integrate across apps and
deliver a seamless user experience, taking
what used to be 20 clicks on a PC down
to 3 to 5 taps on a mobile device.
At the same time, for a mobile strategy to
be effective in any organisation, a cultural
change must take place. To begin,
companies can assign tiger teams
consisting of veterans who understand the
current business and change agents who
think disruptively to look at innovation and
emerging technologies. At the core of this
change must be greater inclusivity of
millennial preferences, since this
generation is now the largest workforce
segment and therefore key to future
success.
Mobile-first organisations have changed
the ordinary to the extraordinary. For
example, buying a product at an Apple
retail store is different to any other
shopping experience. Other companies at
the forefront of digital transformation are
organisations with a high B-to-C
imperative - think airlines and consumer
banks. Mobile boarding passes have
already drastically changed the airport
experience, and if a bank doesn't offer a
high quality mobile app then consumers
are switching to those that can.
Many enterprises are striving to adopt
digital transformation, but to be successful
in their venture they must begin by
implementing a mobile-first approach. NC
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