Catalyze June 22

BUZZWORDS FOR MAKING YOUR
BUSINESS SUSTAINABLE
F R O M : J I M M A C L E N N A N , V I C E P R E S I D E N T ,
I N N O V A T I O N , H I T A C H I S O L U T I O N S
MacLennan:
Digital transformation. If you do a Google search, you can see that it's a relatively new
buzzword over the past 10 years. It's really spiked up in popularity. A lot more searches are
going on. And a lot of people are talking about what it means to do a digital
transformation or be a digital business. And I found that the easiest way to help that
conversation is to have a really simple framework - a simple way to define what it means
to be a digital business. It's five simple components. The first three are things you would
expect: systems and processes designed to automate internal operations, bring you closer
to your customers, and even information becoming part of the products that you sell. It's
really, you know, what you make, whom you sell it to and how you fulfill it. That's pretty
much business right there. The next important component is the data itself. And I'm not
talking about pulling all this information together. I'm saying, how do you, how does your
company get information out of that data and use it to make good business decisions?
And finally, the one component that most folks don't expect - the last component of a
great digital business - is your team.
The people inside of your organization connect with your customers and manufacture and
ship the products that you sell. It's an incredibly important piece of a digital business. Now
that we have a simple framework for digital business, we can start talking about all those
specific initiatives that we want to figure out how to make happen in our company. It's
easier to keep control of things and understand who's gonna take ownership and how
we're gonna prioritize things because they plug into this really simple framework. It's a
powerful way to sort of distill a tough-to-deal-with idea like digital transformation. And it
really helps. A lot of us went to another to try to make sense of it all. We went to
innovation and innovation's a buzzword, but really innovation was the key. Innovation was
the key to finding ways to apply digital technology for companies to be able to react
better and become resilient and understand how to deal with this big change of what
was going on. And it also allowed us to become more innovative. But my point is that a lot
of companies talk to me and say “My business is not innovative. I don't know how to do
that. It's just not in our culture and I can't figure out how to do it.” But there is a way to
engineer innovation inside of an organization. It's really five simple components.
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