Digital Transformation Consulting

Digitally enabling your business functions for the technology world of the 21st century.

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Customers and employees expect a more seamless and consumer-friendly way to interact with the companies they do business with.

For many, the gold standard is the ease at which you can transact with Amazon. Becoming more digital internally and externally is increasingly the only path to greater profitability, differentiated offerings, speed to market, and market share.

Companies are grappling with complex questions that suggest a need for digital transformation.

What is my Uber? What digitally enabled competitor is working to upend my business?
How do I set clear priorities around “being digital” and optimally deploy capital?
How do I convince my management team that this is a long journey? And how do I adopt a digital mindset and ensure alignment at all levels of my organization?
What areas of digital should I focus on (GTM strategy vs. product/service innovation vs. supply chain, etc). Which has the most significant return? Which is the most risky? Which can be accomplished the quickest?
Should I invest in new digital business opportunities or focus on digitizing my current operating model?
Can we reimagine and digitize our current business processes and how does our digital platform leverage data insights to evolve our business model?

Darren Rehrer

National Strategy Alignment and Architecture Practice Lead

Business Consulting Services

Digital Transformation Definition

Digital Transformation is a long-term journey to rewire how a business operates using modern, scalable, digital technologies to eliminate friction at critical points of interaction between your company and its customers, prospects and employees.

What market forces drive the need for digital transformation?

Major market disruptions like manufacturers setting up a direct-to-consumer sales channel drive the need for digital transformation. Also, event tickets being delivered digitally or more subtle changes like declining customer NPS scores due to perceived difficulty in transacting with your company.

Another example is increased employee turnover because the employee experience is outdated and the realization that your operating costs are not in line with industry standards due to outdated processes and a lack of automation. Or the inability to grow the top line due to uncertainty of marketing effectiveness.

Digital transformation begins with strategy and vision, but like any transformation requires leadership alignment and commitment, adoption of a true digital mindset, a transformative execution plan that brings new capabilities to life, and finally ongoing measurement of digitally enabled outcomes that drive adjustment to the roadmap.

Defining core strategic intents, understanding your operating model, and unlocking the value of your data are critical components of a successful digital transformation. Centric Consulting’s comprehensive approach incorporates much more than just technology considerations.

Although each company’s needs will vary, we find that digital enablement projects generally fall into the following 6 broad types:

Digital Business Transformations

Strategic direction for large-scale change that reimagines complete business domains touching capabilities, experiences, and business application architecture.

Customer Experience Enhancements

Revisioning the customer journey to delight at all phases of your customer value chain. Is the purchase journey amazing? Is being your customer effortless? And, is asking for help, submitting a claim, or doing a return a painless process?

Product & Service Innovation Efforts

Designing new products and services that would not be possible without modern technologies. Or reinventing old products to utilize always-on, digitally connected capabilities.

Employee Experience Enhancements

Giving employees the tools and collaboration technologies that increase job satisfaction, build brand loyalty and empower best-in-class customer service.

Reimagining Digital Operating Models

Rethinking your organization structure and business processes for automation, efficiency, and ease of use taking advantage of the full arsenal of the various digital building blocks.

Business Growth Exploration

Empowering your marketing and sales teams with integrated business applications, collaboration technologies, data, and metrics to efficiently target, market to, and close prospects.

Discovering The Digital Transformation Opportunity

Our strategists are ready to help reimagine the role of technology in your business and create a digital enablement plan.

Identify Opportunities – What is the business problem that needs to be solved, what unmet customer needs can be satisfied, and or what pain points can be eliminated? Opportunity can be found throughout your value chain by examining operating models, customer journeys, and processes.

Assess The Impact – For identified opportunities understand how they align to and affect the company strategy, the technology and data gaps that need to be addressed, as well as process and people change implications.

Evaluate Alternatives – Build alignment for the best ideas by considering key criteria. Is the opportunity big enough to matter but small enough to be successful? How long is our window of opportunity? And of course, what investments are required? If the right action is to pause or delay, what are the implications of choosing not to take immediate action?

Create a Transformation Roadmap – Transformational plans address key aspects of people, processes, and technology. It’s the roadmap forward and can include sections that address things like technology modernization approach, talent build out, and adoption and change management planning.

Our team can help examine your readiness in each of the foundational areas listed below and design an approach for enhancing your capabilities to activate digital transformation priorities. To become more digital many companies need to reinvent how they design and deliver crucial technical solutions that provide a malleable and future-proof foundation upon which to build.

Agile Mindset

Digital companies have an Agile Mindset that permeates their entire business. This allows for the rapid reprioritization of resources as business needs change. It enables your product delivery teams to rapidly deliver features at scale.

All are supported by the management and technical tooling needed to operate many agile teams on key products concurrently.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence’s application for transforming customer experience and operating models is truly boundless and is a critical digital technology that must be deployed for true transformation.

Applications include hyper-automation of tasks, improving decision-making, personalization of services, and enabling new products and services.

Customer Experience Design

By truly understanding what customers want and need, businesses can create digital experiences that are more engaging, efficient, and effective.

Examples include identifying customer pain points, improving customer engagement, and creating seamless and friction-free customer journeys.

Modern Technology Environment

Cloud is the foundation of your data center modernization approach allowing for lower costs, great security, scalability, reliability, and agility. Cloud enables essential practices like DevOps and containerization and activates modern tech like IoT and AI.

A mastery of cloud computing environments is essential to realizing meaningful and lasting levels of digital transformation.

Modular Software Architecture

Enterprise application architectures are uncoupled, modular, flexible, and easily changed. They are cloud-based and therefore can support the scale needed, and inherently support important modern development necessities like security, containerization, DevOps and CI/CD.

These types of architectures are the foundation of your digital software factory.

Modern Data Architectures & Analytics

Modern approaches make it much easier to collect, store, and access data from a huge variety of sources. This data is critical to delivering personalized customer experiences and efficient supply chains and operations.

Companies need a data strategy and governance, powered by modern tooling, that makes data easy to access and analyze.

Digital Adoption Change Plan

A plan for change adoption ensures your organization can absorb change and ultimately realize the desired benefits from deploying new digital operating models.

Effective change plans ensure alignment on vision and business goals, a multichannel communication approach that encourages collaboration, and measurement of adoption progress for ongoing improvement.

Digital Talent Upskilling

To use technology in a transformative manner companies need a comprehensive plan for technologist development and retention.

Most companies will need to invest in product owners, experience designers, software developers, and more, while their HR department assesses in-house talent and creates a compelling recruiting pitch, shoring up their digital talent bench.

Ready to evolve your digital transformation readiness? Our experts can help.

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WHITE PAPER

From Out-of-Sync to In Alignment

Deb Peluso, National Strategy Alignment and Architecture Practice Lead, shares how business leaders and change agents can intentionally design organizations for optimal results.

Learn what “alignment” is, why your business needs it, and how to align from both the outside in and the inside out.

Plus, get a peek at Centric’s Organization Alignment Framework, our diagnostic and prescriptive guide to align your strategy and architect your operation for peak performance.

Read The White Paper

If your organization does not adopt and embrace a digital mindset that leverages data, your business will most likely be upended in the next 5 years.

Darren Rehrer, National Strategy Alignment and Architecture Practice Lead, Centric Consulting

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Ebooks & White Papers

Our experts examine your digital transformation readiness and help evolve your customer and employee business solutions.

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Digital Transformation Consulting

Digital Transformation Definition

What market forces drive the need for digital transformation?