What is Digital Transformation (explained by Google)? - CxOTalk #625

Показать описание

What is digital transformation? And how does cloud technology support digital transformation? The link between digital transformation and technology is not always clear. Marcus East from the Office of the CTO at Google explains digital transformation in simple, clear terms.

The conversation covers these topics:
-- What is digital transformation?
-- Digital transformation and culture change
-- Challenges of digital transformation
-- Digital transformation and cloud

Marcus East is an international technology and product executive and CDO/CIO/CTO with over 20 years experience of working in Information Technology, specializing in, Digital Product, Digital Transformation, and Electronic Commerce.

===
===

From the conversation:

Michael Krigsman: Digital transformation is about culture and change. What is the role of technology?

Marcus East: I believe technology is an enabler to all of those things that I talked about: to measurement, to experimentation, to collaboration, to agility, and to customer focus. A good example would be the way in which we now, through one of the tools that we have called BigQuery, we allow our customers to take huge data sets, multi-petabyte data sets, move them into a serverless environment where they can then use our tools in order to analyze that information and to drive insights that then inform their business decisions.

Yes, what we're doing there is we're using our technology to enable better insights and more customer focus for them. I think the foundation of all digital transformation is a flexible, powerful technology.

Michael Krigsman: Let me ask you just to drill down further because I think that the distinction between the technology enablement and the business outcomes, and the connection between those two is so foundational here.

Marcus East: Yeah, agreed. One of the other things that I think is important when it comes to this idea of digital transformation measurement is being clear about the KPIs. The most successful programs that I have seen, either as an executive driving them or as somebody supporting them externally, have been those that have had a very tight focus on very explicit business outcomes. I think the technologists benefit from having those very clear KPIs and targets because it allows them to develop solutions that work toward those.

Ultimately, there are many ways in which people are using technology to drive digital transformation. If I draw my own experience when I was at National Geographic, we were using technology to drive down the cost of creating and distributing content. That was very important to us as a media company. Many of the media companies that we work with are looking at ways in which they can just drive down the cost of their operations.

Cloud plays a very important role there. Many of them are consolidating data centers into public cloud infrastructures. That's one aspect and often the starting point for their digital transformation.

They often quickly move on to think about, what are the new products and services that we can build that can take advantage of the way in which consumers are consuming content? Recently, I was at a conference called IBC, which is a big media and entertainment conference. I had the opportunity to speak with lots of customers from the media and entertainment world.

Many of them are now thinking about how they can build that direct relationship with consumers that haven't existed for them before. Many of them have been producing content that has gone through a TV channel or gone through a cable network, but now they're looking at digital transformation as a way to build those direct relationships with consumers. We have tools and capabilities that can help them with that based on our many years of experience of building solutions and building products that have been used by consumers.

I think the third aspect to digital transformation that's important is this idea that you may have to change your business processes in order to be successful. A good example would be when I worked at a big retailer back in the U.K. We were very good at building new experiences in the digital world, but we realized that we had to also change some of our business processes.

For example, prior to investing in our digital transformation, there was no 24/7 operational support for customers because, typically, customer support was driven in stores. Through working with our technology partners, we were able to build a 24/7 capability that had to be reflected within our internal operations as well. Digital transformation affects every aspect of the business from the technology through the processes and operations to the relationship with the customers.