SAP is one of these digital transformation ‘consultants’, helping organisations in their pursuit of becoming an intelligent enterprise digital transformation journey. And, this journey is just as important as the destination — the destination is to become an intelligent enterprise that satisfies customers and employees. A lot of organisations have decided they’re going to do digitally transform, but often, they struggle with it.
SAP’s view (and others) is that digital transformation should have a much more profound affect on an organisation’s assets; it impacts data but most importantly, it also impacts people, both as consumers of things that have been digitally transformed, but also as creators, constructors and builders of digital transformation.
We are digital transformation consultants; we have journeys and roadmaps and customer pathways that capture digital transformations for particular industries, or for organisations that have particular constraints.
But for us we also want people to think about the goal. Don’t digitally transform just for digital transformation’s sake. You want to transform digitally so that your enterprise is more agile, it’s faster, it’s more nimble, it’s more optimised. And these are all examples of intelligence.
Are they any cross-industry trends?
What we tend to find is that the majority of industries want to start on digital transformations that are people facing [user experience, APIs, customer experience, employee experience, partner experience]. That can be relatively straightforward or consistent, in terms of cross-industry demand.
But we’re also cognisant that a lot of industries have a lot of constraints when it comes to reaching out to people, interacting with people, and trying to be intelligent with their interaction with people; things like GDPR for example, make that potentially more complicated in some industries.
The long and the short of it would be yes, we do digital transformation across a range of industries: financial services, retail, telecommunications, energy, public sector, local authorities etcetera. All of these sectors — and the organisations within them — are transforming themselves in different ways and at different speeds to become more digital and become more intelligent. We can provide a range of solutions, technologies and answers to help them choose how and where they want to start that.