Between life and death of business is digital transformation

Why is digital transformation important? Most organisations find themselves asking why they should spend millions of Pula or dollars investing in these digital transformations and all these new phenomenons that are coming up in the industry.

In order to fully understand the importance of digital transformation as an exercise that the organisation needs to take, it’s very necessary to look at the progression of technology. And this is best explained by three fundamental laws, which are: the Moore’s Law, the Butters’ Law as well as the Kryder’s Law.

FIRSTLY, MOORE’S LAW SHOWS US THAT PROCESSING POWER DOUBLES EVERY NINE MONTHS. SECONDLY,

Butters’ Law shows us that communication speed doubles every 18 months. And thirdly,

Kryder’s Law shows us that storage capacity doubles every 16 months. With all this, we realise something; a phenomenon that shows that the rate of technological growth is exponential. This means the increases between the different data points are greater with passing time. But on the other hand, we as human beings are conditioned to think in a linear way. This would mean we’re conditioned to move from three to six to nine to 12. This is explained directly within our biology. For example, a baby is not going to just wake up one morning and start running 100 metres.

The baby’s going to start off by wiggling across the floor, and then they will crawl, and then they will try to walk and fall multiple times before they can actually be able to jog, let alone run. Therefore, since businesses are run by human beings, this means that businesses grow at a linear rate, whilst technology grows at an exponential rate.

Consequently, this creates a big gap between where technology is at as well as where business is at, at given points in time. This is exactly what creates room for disruption.

Disruption basically means that a new player can be able to come to an industry where previous incumbents were thriving and able to completely change the status quo. So, as a result, it’s important that organisations that come in must ensure that they actively close the gap between technology advancement as well as their business development. This way, they can be able to close the gap for potential entrants who might come in and disrupt their status quo. It also increases their capability and capacity to be able to continue to grow.

Now that we understand the importance of data transformation in closing the gap between business advancement as well as technology advancement; it’s necessary for us to look at the different types of technologies that are being deployed worldwide to close this gap.

In the next part, we’ll be looking at some of these different technologies that have been used in the recent past. Thereafter, we will look at some of the technologies that are being used right now as we speak in advanced economies. Lastly, we will look into some of the technologies that we’re still experimenting with our various clients.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ( MEANING, CASE STUDY & IMPACT)

As we may be aware, digital transformation is the key to bridging the gap between technological advancement and business development. In discussing this, we realised that because of the exponential nature of the growth of technology, and the linear nature of the people behind businesses, there’s a significant gap that leads to incumbents getting disrupted.

And so, what is digital transformation? And what can I as an organisation do to be able to explore and harness the various advantages that it promises to give? This article will serve as a guide to show and illustrate what digital transformation is, and then we’ll go on to use an

example of a local incumbent that has been able to use digital transformation to transform their organisation.

According to the Harvard Business Review, digital transformation is the act of leveraging on data technologies to increase operational efficiency, to improve customer experience and to find new good opportunities. To illustrate this, we will look at a local incumbent.

CASE STUDY: BOTSWANA POST

Until 2012, Botswana Post was just a postal company. This meant that they took mail from point A to point B across their large network of branches. However, the advent of email, social media and other digital technologies meant that their core business would become depleted over time if they did not transform.

Therefore, their organisation embarked on a digital transformation journey that was aimed at:

1) increasing the operational efficiency of their current core business;

2) improving their customer experience in the services they were providing, and

3) going on to find new, exciting opportunities.

TRANSITIONING TO CLOUD BASED

Firstly, Botswana Post started off by bringing their infrastructure and moving it completely to cloud. This meant that they were able to