Digital transformation: Not a Solo Journey

Home to one billion smartphone users and 60% of the world’s youth population, Asia Pacific has all the dynamic socio-economic conditions to lead the world in digital transformation and innovations.

The region is already attracting the largest amount of FinTech investments globally, at US$14.8 billion and it is just one of the many booming sectors in the region. If done right, digital technologies can be a powerful enabler for companies to transform and remain competitive.

Urgent need for organizations in Asia Pacific to be agile

Rapid technological advancements are creating waves of disruption across the region. According to the CA Technologies Asia Pacific and Japan Digital Transformation Impact and Readiness Study, four in five business and IT leaders in Asia Pacific have indicated that their markets have been digitally disrupted.

In Asia Pacific, ride-hailing apps, such as Grab, Go-Jek, Ola Cabs and Didi Chuxing, have managed to redefine the transportation landscape in the last few years. The once-dominant taxi industry is now on the back foot and seeking new ways to maintain their growth.

And corporate giants of yesteryears, now serve as poignant reminders for organizations of the consequences of inaction in the fast-evolving digital world. There is a clear and urgent need for organizations to create an agile business to take advantage of the rapidly evolving and increasingly digitalized business landscape.

Successful digital transformation requires help from the right partners

However, companies usually are unable to achieve business agility due to factors such as siloed organization culture, archaic processes, and legacy technologies. According to a study by the Harvard Business Review, while 69% of businesses understand the importance of unlocking digital opportunities, 75% of them are not at all confident that their organizations possess the digital acumen required to excel in the space.

To successfully traverse the digital transformation journey necessitates a holistic approach from organizations, and CIOs need to take a step back and reflect on their capabilities. This is a key step to identify the areas that they will require help, and then engage the three types of partners – culture coaches, process experts and technology specialists.

Culture coaches – laying the foundation for digital transformation

In an environment of rapid change, it’s important that businesses remain laser-focused to be relevant and place customers at the center of everything they do. Business agility has become crucial and is multi-faceted.

Culture coaches and consultants help businesses navigate the agile journey to overcome process and cultural challenges. Much like life coaches, these coaches help rewire organization’s DNA to achieve greater success – whether that be more revenue, improved customer satisfaction, or even creating new markets.

Culture coaches need to be well-versed in the roles of different functions in an organization – from Sales, Marketing, LOBs to Production and IT. They are responsible to break-down knowledge silos and build information bridges allowing businesses to respond to opportunities and threats, quickly and confidently.

To be agile, organizations must change their culture organically. Culture coaches help in organizational restructuring to identify agile coaches, transformation agents, and other leaders who drive the training, structure and systems that facilitate transformation. It can be challenging, but it will assist in turning ideas into outcomes-regardless of the industry they belong or cater to.

Process experts – helping organizations operationalize and scale continuous improvement

If culture coaches are akin to life coaches, process experts are the nutritionists.

Process experts are responsible for the collaboration between development and IT operations (and everyone in between!) – building a high-performing DevOps culture. Agile and DevOps form the core of the digital transformation journey for any organization and together are the ultimate force multiplier.

It’s been a decade since the onset of the application economy, yet organizations face the basic issues: the need to quickly roll out new apps, integration, and business models, especially when an organization’s enterprise architecture is based on legacy applications.

A process expert brings cross-functional teams and disciplines together into a cohesive, higher-performing whole.

DevOps is the most effective manner of putting agile methodologies to work in the digital transformation journey and existing practitioners are realizing a long list of benefits.

A process expert manages integration, automation, and orchestration of the entire DevOps toolchain. Reaching a state of automation should be a priority as it becomes the heartbeat of the digital transformation enabling organizations to build and release software quickly, more frequently, and without delays or disruptions.

Technology specialists – unlocking the value of digital transformation with new digital capabilities

Along with fast-evolving economic conditions and changing customer expectations, possessing capabilities to develop high-quality, secure software applications faster and continuously improve the applications’ performance to ensure seamless user experience is critical in today’s mobile-first world.

Technology specialists play a crucial role to help navigate the complexity of hybrid IT/ multi-cloud environments and the software complexity arising from architectural shifts i.e. monolithic to n-tier, SOA and now microservices.

These specialists offer solutions, skills and capabilities to accelerate application delivery, improve quality and deliver better customer experience, while also managing security risks and integrating an organization’s diverse technologies and processes to attain better results.

To achieve real digital transformation, organizations require fast, sweeping modernization of conventional culture, processes and systems into new cloud-based systems that are agile, mobile-first, and able to deliver disruptive, real-time intelligence.

It is evident that the journey will not be an easy one for many, but choosing the right partners makes this transformation journey shorter, smoother and more impactful; further assuring and emphasizing an organization’s future readiness.

Ashok Vasan
Vice President, Partners, Asia Pacific & Japan, CA Technologies