Comment: Three considerations for a digital evolution

But when embarking on such a journey, what do you need to consider before, during and after?

Start with innovation

Innovation is the idea behind the whole process. It has to underscore both the implementation and then operational aspects of a digital evolution.

Where do you want to get to? For example, if it’s about embracing AI — what’s the goal?

Innovation is different for start-ups, enterprises and corporations, but, ultimately, it is about competitive advantage. For an enterprise or corporation, for example, it’s more about business focus and spend. The ambition might be to build a new business offering or to save on costs. The purpose is always different, but for all businesses, innovation always has to have a tangible outcome.

Innovation for the sake of innovation is like a personal philosophy that doesn’t help you in life. Not helpful. If we take AI as an example again, a business shouldn’t just implement it because it wants to. What benefit does it bring to the business? Is it a new offering, a new product, or a new business unit?

This also depends on the type of company. When you innovate you need to set a target with what you want to achieve so you can plan and move in the right direction. Ask yourself the why, the what and the how. Without this clarity and a target in mind, it’s like having a ship but without a direction to move that ship in. You need direction to set the idea into motion.

Implement your innovation

Implementation is how you transform your ideas into something tangible — the journey of putting the innovation into practice. This journey will of course be dependent on what you want to innovate. But implementation is the journey.

Let’s take a real-world example. Say you want to get from Bristol to a specific part of London. To do this, you might have to get a taxi to the train station, then get the train, then jump on the underground to reach your destination. Rather than immediately aiming for the end location, you need to break up the journey into manageable chunks. That’s where implementation starts.

In terms of AI, understanding your AI starts with understanding your data. So, you’ll need data systems — like a data lake — that will bring the necessary information or capability to start fitting the data to AI. This enables you to do the next step. Once you’ve achieved a product or a service, that’s just the start of the journey. Then it’s over to the operational side of delivering it.

Run the operations

Once you implement, you then have to operate. When it comes to operations, cost savings are typically behind everything. You have to train your product, if it needs training, and this product then needs to manage your business processes, with the aim of hitting the original target that came from the innovation.

If it’s a product that is being delivered, it’s about how you incorporate this into your existing business processes. How do you keep it alive, how do you constantly improve and evolve it. If it’s AI you’re working with, it’s about retraining your models alongside changing business requirements.

This is the difference between a digital transformation and a digital evolution, the continuous nature of the process. Once you reach this end point and complete the circle, you go back to step one — innovation — and start the process again.

The bottom line

Pursuing a digital evolution can be broken down into three key pillars. It all begins with the what, then you outline why you are doing your digital evolution, and finally you focus on the operational side of delivering it — how you are going to do it.

It’s about getting into this mindset and preparing yourself to do it right. This, in turn, becomes routine and habitual, and extends out to other departments. Once you have this, you can then run several projects at the same time and innovate in all different directions.

A digital evolution is all about creating a culture of change. It isn’t as quick as flicking a switch, but the benefits certainly outweigh the time you invest.

Mihai Cernei, CTO at Amdaris