Hotel? Trivago - Digital Transformation? ​

Disclaimer: Views are mine, although I'll be glad if some employers want to share'em. Digital Transformation - The new analyst buzzword that supposedly ends world hunger, solves cancer, also vents a can of coke at the pantry. Seriously! It's unbelievable that somebody could conjure the idea of making up a single phrase to target all of the addressable enterprise IT market. The phrase is so popular and common that most execs feel compelled to use it when they want to live in a world of abstract-correctness with little to no usefulness. What's wrong in that? - you might ask. So did I; And, I looked up the phrase with the hopes of finding a definition on the web and this came up.

Digital transformation is the profound and accelerating transformation of business activities, processes, competencies and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies and their impact across society in a strategic and prioritized way,with present and future shifts in mind. That's how people who wanted to be Che Guevara but ended up wearing suits talk when they meet each other. Needless to mention the analysts, marketers PowerPoint pundits who put that in a slide will be basking in the schadenfreude of sales folks who fail to make a convincing pitch on DX - oh yeah, how could they miss the acronym. The wave of DX is so overwhelming to some sales folks find themselves selling a philosophy that doesn't fly if their customers weren't listening to the same analyst firms that your marketing that made the slides were listening to. There is too little to walk the talk on DX, or there is little being said or thought through on how to deliver the moon that is being promised. Oftentimes, this is because most organizations are trying to plan out their existing technology products services and label it with a DX spin. The single most important aspect to realize about DX is the fact that it is not about you as a sales personnel, marketer, or an architect or the products or services you've vested interests on. It is important to identify the landscape in which your customer operates in and what technological advancements do they/their customer have access to that wasn't available earlier. How could such availability of technology be part of their IT/marketing/sales/operations strategy? Making that discovery should be the objective of every individual playing in a role in DX. Any introduction of new digital touch points may be kept to a minimum or at a marginal cost. This is possible when one is willing to take a pause, resist the urge to merely sell what they have (more on that here), instead understand the customer landscape and explore technological advancements that have happened (mostly due to consumerization of IT) that could be brought and tied together to solve existing problems in newer ways. Now, discover and explore the best digital transformation opportunity by identifying the best and most suitable digital touchpoints in your business and unify them. That's how and when finding (or being) a DX partner will be as easy as; Hotel? Trivago.