Discover successful Examples of Digital Transformation.
Digital technology changes the world and the people in it. It changes the way people behave, and this in turn alters their expectations from the world around them. For businesses, this means adapting new technologies in order to fulfil consumer expectations. The process by which businesses do so is digital transformation.
The impact of digital technology in business is huge, forcing many companies to make huge changes in order to compete for their market share. According to one estimate, up to 80% of companies are undergoing some form of digital transformation—but only 25% have a clear understanding of new digital technologies, and how they can best be used.
Some are experiencing significant success in this regard, serving as excellent examples of what can be done to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world. Where companies are successful, the key seems to be to approach the problem from a customer-centric point of view. As always, finding out what consumers want, and then delivering it, is a crucial step on the road to success.
Digital transformation #1 StubHub
StubHub is the world’s biggest ticket marketplace, with tens of millions of unique visitors and ticket sales every year. But the digital demands of processing thousands of transactions every day meant the company was struggling to provide a consistent level of service to its legions of users.
The solution for StubHub has been to build its own private data cloud, one with tremendous scaling capacity. This ensures that the organisation can cope with the highly variable level of demand its websites experience on a day-to-day basis. In addition, the company plans to use a public cloud vendor to process transactions locally in many countries, and add functionality to make selling tickets easier and more intuitive for mobile users, and to make buying tickets easier for groups of people.
Digital transformation #2 Domino’s
Fast food delivery services are, by sheer necessity, one of the early adopters of digital technology, and the most savvy of those are typically quick to adopt new technological advances as they become available.
Domino’s is definitely high up on the list, with its development of a web-based platform that allows users to order from its website on any computer or mobile device, including smart watches, smart TVs, the Amazon Echo, and Google Home.
The company has also started to roll out a drone delivery system, pioneering the tech in New Zealand, where the first delivery was made in November 2016.
Domino’s Group CEO and Managing Director, Don Mei commented “We are taking a ‘Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly’ approach to roll out drone delivery, and we are getting closer to the time where you can push a button on your smartphone and have Domino’s delivered by DRU Drone by Flirtey to your home.”
Now, Domino’s has plans to start drone programmes in Australia, France, and Japan, among other locations.
Most recently, Domino’s added a digital assistant to its repertoire of technological enhancements, allowing users to interact with the assistant via website-based text or voice conversation to order food. The company is now focusing on improving the voice-based version of the assistant in order to better interpret a wider range speech styles, accents, and order combinations.
Digital transformation #3 Sprint
Telecommunications is another area where the ability to efficiently adopt new digital technology is vital for survival in a highly competitive market. Sprint has definitely risen to the challenge, focusing on large-scale data analysis in order to improve
With a massive 50 terabytes of data to search, sort, and analyse, the company has adopted an open-source platform called Elastic Stack, which can work with data from a huge variety of sources. This was an important consideration for the company, with data being culled from logs, emails, databases, and a variety of other sources.
Using the data, the Sprint IT team can determine where customers are running into problems when they attempt to perform transactions online—and using this information can redesign transaction processes to improve customer service.
Digital transformation #4 The Town of Cary, North Carolina
When you think of digital transformation it’s usually businesses that come to mind, but it’s also an incredibly useful—and increasingly essential—strategy for government, both at the local at the national level. In this small American town, CIO Nicole Raimundo has transformed the way the town operates, with stunning success.
Prior to the transformation, the town used over 100 different processes to do everything from onboarding to processing permits, work orders, and other day-to-day tasks. Part of Raimundo’s award-winning strategy was to eliminate all of these processes and replace them with Salesforce, a web-based CRM platform that provides both a detailed and a global view of the city.
Another innovation was the development of an Amazon Echo app that allows Cary’s citizens to use the device to request a range of government services. According to Raimundo, the level of service that Google provides has been a major source of inspiration in the town’s transformation.