Digital Transformation Game Plan

Chapter 9. Letting Data Decide

Historically the need for certainty has slowed the pursuit of new opportunities. The preplanned financial years with all of the work and the spend decided before companies have even begun the work have provided a false sense of surety that allowed them to provide stakeholders with a sense of certainty about what the company would do. Today the pace of change is such that this foundation of guesswork will no longer suffice; organizations need to become more adept at moving forward with imperfect information.

In a world of ambiguity and constant change, certainty has to be traded off with accuracy. Data has become the new economy and a critical component of sustainable digital transformation. Digital transformation demands responsiveness, and responsiveness can be measured by your ability to capture and use data to build knowledge. The organizations that are consistently able to adapt to industry disruption are the ones that are successfully using data as the basis of what to do, when to do it, and—more important—when to stop doing it.

Across nearly all industries, we are seeing transformation driven by the availability of data; for example:

• The retail sector using omnichannel data to drive sales and customer understanding, creating differentiated personalized experiences for their customers

• In agriculture, the use of sensors to monitor crops and livestock so that producers can maximize production and manage the quality of outputs

• Manufacturing ...