Increasingly we find content in electronic form and with data costs decreasing due to increased competition and regulatory intervention more and more people have access to information thereby empowering them to make more informed decisions. This paper will explore the ecosystem that will be required to enable organizations to move to the digital world; including the platform that the organizations will need irrespective of industry to drive new sources of revenue and the convergence between the various industries.

1. Digital Transformation Point of View
Digital Transformation Point of View
By: Vickesh Dhookie
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2. Digital Transformation Point of View
Contents
1.
Introduction ...............................................................................................................3
2.
Why the Digital Transformation.................................................................................4
3.
The Digital Platform ..................................................................................................7
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1. Introduction
Increasingly we find content in electronic form and with data costs decreasing due to increased
competition and regulatory intervention more and more people have access to information
thereby empowering them to make more informed decisions. This paper will explore the
ecosystem that will be required to enable organizations to move to the digital world; including the
platform that the organizations will need irrespective of industry to drive new sources of revenue
and the convergence between the various industries.
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2. Why the Digital Transformation
Customers have become more empowered through their access to information, the proliferation
of smart phones, social media and the rapid digitisation of content and as a result their
purchasing decisions are becoming a great deal more complex, as now customers don’t merely
accept the direct marketing from organisations but in fact perform their own research online and
via social media and find out what their friend’s experience with a product or service was before
making the purchasing decision.
The combination of digital portal, digital commerce, customer experience, social, mobile and
analytics has resulted in more and more organizations having to make this shift into the digital
world.
There are six key pillars upon which this digital transformation will occur namely:
1. Digital Portal – The need across the organization for a single user interface to
ensure that all areas of the organization are easily accessible by customers,
employees and 3rd party organizations.
2. Digital Commerce – As organizations move toward a more even split between
bricks and mortar to digital, the purchasing methods and payment mechanisms
will need to evolve. For example In Africa where there is a large unbanked
population and low percentage of the population has access to credit cards;
using mobile money could ensure a greater uptake of digital services.
3. Customer Experience – With the empowerment of the customer and greater
access to information targeting the customer as an individual instead of a
segment is critical going forward. Thus conducting customer profiling, behavioral
analysis and pricing-product and promotion mix ensures targeted campaigns are
executed to the customer at the right time and in context.
4. Mobile – This will span from devices to any surface a display will be able to be
presented on i.e. buildings, walls, mirrors, fridges, counter tops etc.
5. Social – Social business will become core to the fabric of future business and
change the manner in which customers and organizations interact in conducting
the purchasing decision as well as the resultant transactions. As can be seen this
will go well beyond social media and will very quickly evolve to social business.
6. Analytics – Analytics will enable and underpin in a number of instances the
digital organization in order to drive predictive product recommendations or
executive proactive actions.
These six pillars will impact all levels of society from the individual through to organizations as
well as industries. These pillars will drive organizations that were traditionally siloed and neatly
departmentalized to shift to an incorporation of an ecosystem where not only departments are
interdependent but organizations are. A good example of this is one of the stationer organizations
where the organizations logistics is outsourced to DHL; it uses Amazon as its store front and
Google for its analytics a truly virtual organization. The same realization of the ecosystem will
occur within organizations when they move into cloud value added services or machine-tomachine as the organization will not provide all the services they will require and will have to
leverage off application vendors to provide the services that they will onboard onto their platforms
and on sell the service.
Organizations embarking on their digital transformation journey will need to re-evaluate their endto-end commerce lifecycle from how they procure and purchase goods or services through to how
they market to the individual entity and up sell and cross-sell to this individual entity and finally
how do they ensure repeat purchases, customer service and self-service as well as reverse
logistics once the goods or services have been acquired.
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A key aspect to note here is that when embarking on this digital transformational journey the core
area of focus should be commerce and not analytics, cloud or security as these are merely
enablers within your business however they do not drive the business.
Another aspect as to why the drive for the organization to move away from voice and data
revenues and towards value added services is as a result of the over the top (OTT) players such
as Whatsapp and Skype cutting into the sms and voice revenues of the organizations. In driving
to the value added services business models some organizations have realized that they cannot
do it all alone and an ecosystem needs to be created in order to move to the digital organization
and new business models.
The organizational ecosystem required for both Machine-to-Machine and cloud value added
services capabilities are comprised of the following components which will be described further
below:
Customers: We start with the customer as the foremost part of this ecosystem however this
customer could now not only be a customer of the organization but the organization could also be
a customer of the customer. A typical example of this could be an application developer who has
a data contract with the organization. However the developer also develops applications that he
sells to the organization who in turn on sells to its customers. Another scenario could be SME’s
who purchase unified communication services from the organization and then resells its
application instance of its offering back to the organization to on sell.
Communications Vendors: This element encompasses various wide area network technologies
over which instrumented data from device domain could be transferred. This typically has been
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cellular providers encompassing 2.5 G, 3G or 4G networks however due to improvements in
carrier grade Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi offloading fixed line operators, network equipment providers, cities
and ISP’s are also to be considered.
Value Added Resellers: This will be the glue of the ecosystem although organizations will be
able to deliver the digital platform not all services and applications will be provided by the
organization. A good example of what the value added resellers will provide is, if organizations
decided to sell healthcare value added services, will organizations decide to hire doctors and
nurses to provide these services or will they rather provide the technology platform to enable
these services and let value added resellers on sell these services although there will also be
certain services which would be consumed directly by the end customers and these the
organization would be able to provide directly.
Operations: The operations of the organizations will need to transform to cater for the value
added reseller model. For example, should the organization decide to sell a healthcare value
added services and the end consumer has an issue once the solution is deployed, who does the
end consumer revert back to? Is it the organization or the value added reseller? If the
organization is the single point of contact then will its contact centre be equipped to seamlessly
reroute the call to the value added reseller or the actual service provider?
Application Vendors: These will be the vendors who will provide the applications that will reside
within the ecosystem of the digital platform to enable customer value. There would be different
vertical applications which can be plugged into the digital platform.
Industry Verticals: Each vertical will have a unique offering which can be provided by the digital
services provider such as mobile payments for the financial sector, remote patient monitoring for
the healthcare sector etc.
SI Vendors: In order to on-board application providers, manage the digital platform, co-ordinate
the broader ecosystem and drive business into the various industries – SI vendors would form a
critical role in assisting organizations with these initiatives.
Cloud Complementors: While organizations will attempt to create as much as possible on their
own digital platforms, in certain instances platforms could merely be on-sold by the organization.
For example, should a mining house create a digital platform relevant to the mining sector then
integration by the digital service provider into this platform and merely on selling this capability will
be a viable business model.
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3. The Digital Platform
The digital platform that is required by organizations across industries in preparation of this digital
world foundational building block is the digital portal as this will allow for aggregation of
applications and provide a single user interface to the organization both from a customer and
employee perspective. More importantly however the digital portal should provide the ability to
cater for both feature and smart phones as 80 percent of subscribers at least within the growth
market regions still have feature phones. Now while organizations have been engaging in portal
projects since the early 2000’s the drive for digital portal is significantly different as now one has
to take into account different display types, screen resolutions and input types just as touch
screen and key pad. Technologies such as HTML 5 and XML Device Independent Markup
Extensions have made rapid response design a great deal more standardized and easier to
implement also taking into account the requirement to give the best experience to the subscriber
for the mobile display they are consuming.
Digital Commerce – this is the mechanism by which the value added service will be sold. At this
point in time the value added service is limited to the traditional ringtones, music etc. However
going forward the content could be value added services such as software as a service or lifestyle
services. The commerce component will be the store front for the organization and could be
resold to the Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) market to provide a personalized store front for
the SME whereby the organization could immediately see its return on investment. Key areas to
take into account are the order and inventory management as well as the supply chain and
transportation management requirements within the commerce component of the platform.
Customer Experience – the requirement to cater for each customer’s personalized customer
experience requires the use of quantitative analytics, qualitative analytics, campaign
management and pricing and promotion mix to ensure the profiles, patterns and behavior of the
customer is understood and that targeted and relevant campaigns are sent to the customer at the
right time to ensure that the up-sell and cross-sell of the of the specific offers have a higher take
up by the customer. There are 6 key principles which customer experience is focused on:
 Originality – delight the customer
 Forward looking – being proactive
 Flexibility – provide the customer with what they want, when they want it
 Transparency – clear explanations resulting in trusted advisor status
 Personalization – know what the customer wants and needs
 Communication – engage in an open dialog with the customer
 Reliability – being consistent and available when customer requires
Mobile Applications – where organizations will need to build applications for mobile devices or
at least while it is still the craze. Once apps start to be used for enterprises and business and not
just entertainment or information then we will start seeing issues similar to the ones we
experienced in the early 2000’s. In the early 2000’s we were developing VB and C apps, installing
on desktops and laptops and running into issues such as conflicts between applications,
upgrading the apps, version control, support and maintenance. In order to resolve these issues
the web browser was created and so the applications resided on a server and users accessed the
applications via the web browser. Going forward the digital portal as discussed upfront will be
how applications are accessed. However for now there is still a need to develop applications for
devices and so one needs to take into account the development environment for the apps that will
enable cross platform deployment, the management of the device from a policy and version
management perspective, the security of the application on the device and the ability to conduct
automated code validation, data encryption and secure connectivity and the final aspect being
analytics on the device and the ability to conduct qualitative analytics on the customer and
determine the customer experience based on the usage of the application. When considering
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application development one needs to understand that this will primarily be driven by an
ecosystem of application vendors from a single developer to big corporate. Success will depend
on how quickly organizations are able to onboard application vendors; manage the service levels
with the vendors and the certification of their applications onto the organization’s platform. The
application vendors will also introduce what is a foreign concept to organizations and that is the
need to pay the vendors for their services provided along with various types of business models
they could engage in with the application vendor.
Social Business – will also form part of the digital platform although today most people still see it
as we saw the internet in the early 2000’s, where people mainly believed it was good for
information and for the youngsters but not for financial transactions. Today more than 80 percent
of financial transactions occur over the internet and it is a core component to most businesses.
Similarly today we see Social good for information and the youngsters however going forward
social business will be more than just sentiment analysis, reputational risk and brand awareness
it will form a core component of business. A good example of this is the ability to read off social
media API’s and look for certain purchasing patterns from prospective customers and then in real
time be able to analyze what the customer is requesting, what would be the most appropriate
offer to make to the customer and then execute the offer to the customer via for instance,
submitting a URL which points to a storefront where the customer can go and purchase what he
was looking for. Another example of integrating social business into an organization is integrating
Facebook into call centres thereby transforming your call center into a contact center and in the
process cutting costs; as voice calls will eventually no longer be required as well as enhancing
customer experience as the customer now would be able to view on Facebook when the contact
center agent is available via a status indicator instead of waiting in a queue and interact with the
organization within a familiar and comfortable environment. This will also lead to quicker problem
resolution times as the agent would immediately be able to interact with the relevant subject
matter expert’s via a chat facility and provide the customer direct access to the subject matter
expert should this be the organizations policy.
The above mentioned building blocks form the digital platform and this platform is what
organizations irrespective of industry will require in order to move to the digital world we will
integrate into.
Naturally this digital platform will still require business rules, business processes and integration
into legacy applications and so organizations will need to delete, transform or create entirely new
business rules, processes and integrations to fulfill the organizations digital transformation.
With the digital platform in place the organization would also requires analytics at multiple levels
for a core part of the organization and fulfill its digital transformation. While traditional analytics
was seen as a horizontal layer within the organization it is very much more pervasive within
organizations and should now be seen as a vertical layer that spans the horizontal layers of the
organization as depicted in the diagram below:
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Other key areas to highlight for the digital strategy are security, partner on-boarding and the
billing environment. Implementing and enforcing security will become even more complex as
organizations within a given ecosystem will be a great deal more interdependent as well as
agreeing to engage in co-opetition where they will co-operate but also compete in some instances
with one another. The partner on boarding will need to be automated and occur within hours if not
minutes and areas such as value added service certification, contract management and SLA
management will form part of the digital transformation. The current billing environment will also
need to be revisited as at the moment they a predominately designed to collect money however
in the new digital world these environments will also need to pay out money to the ecosystem and
will not be able to easily cater for this hence new billing environments will need to be considered.
The digital platform as described above will form the platform to enable organizations to sell value
added services whether these are cloud, M2M or traditional services and drive organizations into
the digital world.
The digital world ahead will present many opportunities as well as challenges but it will no doubt
move the world from its current stagnant state of no or little innovation to significant
improvements in innovation between customers and organizations alike.
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