How to Make Your Digital Transformation Pay Off in 2024

As a member of the Forbes Technology Council, I often serve as a contributing author on topics like artificial intelligence, digital transformation, customer experiences, and the latest trends in decision automation in the insurance and banking industries.

My most recent submission – “At What Point is Your Digital Transformation a Success?” – seems perfect for New Year’s: the time of year when we all make resolutions to become better versions of ourselves.  Unfortunately, reality rarely matches the dream: statistics show that 90% of us give up on the Peloton, the Nordictrack, and the Bowflex after realizing we haven’t transformed into Chris Hemsworth or Gal Gadot within 90 days.

Getting into Digital Shape

For many companies in the midst of their digital transformation enterprise automation journey, especially in the banking industry and insurance, success can seem just as elusive.

1. Financial institutions spend huge sums of money on digital transformation, artificial intelligence, IT infrastructure and consulting services – $10 trillion through 2025, according to IDC – in the pursuit of world-class digital banking and insurance solutions
2. They tell employees that they are committed to reinventing the company to deliver compelling customer experiences, and even provide detailed descriptions of their digital transformation strategy in their annual reports.
3. But when the real digital transformation work starts, many get timid, take baby steps, and cling to business-as-usual. Those are some of the reasons Boston Consulting Group says only 30% of companies are succeeding in their digital transformation efforts.

Getting Your Digital Transformation in Shape Comes Down to Commitment

The companies who are passionate about digital transformation and AI deeply commit themselves, and become zealots about innovation, experimentation, and business results. They start backward from customer experiences and the information needed to optimize them. Based on my experience, the companies that go further, faster, in their digital transformation all share some common traits.

• They decided on an enterprise automation platform early on, with which they build the technological foundation that enables them to manage their digitally driven business from end to end.  According to IDG, two thirds of companies undertaking digital transformation efforts believe a platform is an essential enabling technology to their success. Furthermore, the gap between public cloud services and running the business is wide and difficult to bridge. To close this gap, an automation platform for applying enterprise decision intelligence runs on top of a public cloud and elevates cloud services to a level of abstraction that businesspeople can use to take control of their digital destiny.
• They establish clear, credible, and transparent KPIs for measuring digital transformation success. They monitor progress, and report their progress openly, good and bad. And most importantly, they memorialize and apply the lessons learned to solidify their collective base of knowledge. In other words, they invest in capturing, sharing, and reusing institutional know-how and this cuts across their base of digital assets as well as their ‘Ways of Working’.
• They have an overarching Grand Vision for their digital transformation strategy, but they don’t pursue automation in a “Big Bang” manner. Instead, they focus on building out a single operational area or application leaning into iteration, experimentation, simulation, and optimization to test and continually refine it in fast cycles.
• Then they move on to the next area or application in their digital transformation; they fine-tune it, deploy it in conjunction with the first application, and keep moving forward with an eye on the final customer experiences. Applications created with an enterprise platform share common “digital DNA”; as new applications come online, they share their data and begin filling in one another’s blind spots to uplift personalized customer insights across all applications.

A Fast Start and a Strong Finish

Just as people who are committed to their New Year’s resolutions are unshakable in their determination to focus on and measure their progress towards their goals, financial institutions that are passionate about their digital transformation are tireless about their work.

To them, the importance of bringing transformative change to their company – by delivering optimal customer experiences and making smarter, faster, more profitable customer decisions at every turn – supersedes everything else that stands in their way. This is the commitment to digital transformation that enables them to out-work, out-innovate, and outmaneuver their competitors even when their processes and technology are not aligned, but when they are… there’s no limits to what they can achieve. 

Perhaps, even their New Year’s Resolutions.

Learn How FICO Platform Can Power Your Digital Transformation

• Read my articles in Forbes
• Explore innovation with FICO Platform
• Watch the video “FICO® Platform: Applied Intelligence, when and where it matters”
• Read the whitepaper “FICO® Enterprise Intelligence Network: Redefining the next generation of applied intelligence”
• See customers discuss their use of FICO Platform
• Read the article from The Journal of Digital Banking, “How Financial Services Leaders Are Using Enterprise Intelligence to Optimize Efficiency Ratios”
• Watch FICO Platform in action with the story of your everyday consumer, Digital Jane