Digital Transformation Conference 2024

14th May 2024 by Frankie Pullan

Digital transformation can be defined as the rewiring of an organisation with the goal of creating value by continuously deploying technology at scale.

Digital transformation and business transformation are often treated as completely separate siloes, however, digital transformation should really be treated as a subset of business strategy and align with the overall business goals.

From the experience of the speakers, the best way to carry out a successful digital transformation is to have a large portion of the executive leadership team involved. Another vital factor is involving insights from the wider team to ensure decisions are insight driven and will fit into the company culture. 96% of people aren’t happy with the workplace tools they have available to them, however 1/3 of employees don’t feel that their technology experiences are taken into account by leadership when planning for the future.

Change management is often forgotten, but is paramount to a successful digital transformation. Christopher Harvey, Head of Change at Tesco, stated that in his experience, a change management team is only ever brought in after an unsuccessful attempt at transformation, showing that its importance is always underestimated the first time round. Digital transformation is about more than simply updating technology; company culture, employee mindset and tech integration are just some of the hurdles that need to be overcome to make a digital transformation successful and so careful change management is vital.

The speakers also shared many lessons learned from large scale digital transformations at their companies. Some of the key learns are as follows:

Learns for Change Management Team:

· Put in effort, time and emotion early on: digital transformation is expensive so only make changes that are really needed and put the required resource and insight in to make it successful.

· Digital Transformations don’t need to be large scale.

· Quick wins matter: they build momentum and cohesion, preserve CEO and board support, unlock funding and reduce governance.

· Don’t try to do everything at once. Change should be incremental, building on and improving each time.

· Culture and mindset are just as important as process, skill and knowledge when undergoing change management.

· It can be difficult to bring along all stakeholders, just focus on getting a majority on board as you can’t always please everyone.

· Don’t measure data for the sake of data: plan what data would be useful for tracking and analytics and track it continuously to inform decisions.

· Don’t build technology for the sake of technology: build should be fulfilling a need, thought out and purposeful.

· If the change isn’t feeling positive: pause, reevaluate then continue in a new direction.

· Avoid digital confusion: too many systems and issues like siloed data lead to integration challenges and complexity.

· Roadmaps should be created across teams to make sure everyone relevant has had an input.

Learns for Leadership:

· Understand your team and their differences and adapt strategies to the team.

· Overcommunicate changes. It’s all about the people, their experience and adoption.

· Create trust.

Digital Overemphasis

The emphasis of a business strategy needs to be human centric, focusing on outcomes for customers and the number of digital tools should be as low as possible to achieve those outcomes. Implementing digital can lead to pitfalls including tech centred tunnel vision, disconnection from human needs and too many different tools.

medDigital Digital Transformation Strategy

Strategy is at the core of medDigital’s work and at the heart of digital transformation. We have run multiple digital transformation projects for global Pharma companies, particularly in recent years, where improving digital presence is more important than ever. We repurposed and re-architected a company’s website presence in an insight driven manner to ensure that all sites were optimised to meet user’s current needs. We also ran a full-scale competitor analysis, audit and workshops to create a roadmap to transform a company’s wider digital presence, from email campaigns to social media to websites.

It is essential for the pharmaceutical industry to keep up with digital advancements to ensure that access to information and healthcare technology are at the forefront of the industry. Maintaining best practice with digital transformation is crucial for seamless improvements to the digital landscape.

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