| February 27, 2018
| 2:35 PM
Digital transformation has been a big buzzword for the last few years, but what is digital convergence?
When working with and enabling people across industry, we’re finding that the question of “going digital” has already been asked and answered. In my experience, all companies are addressing and road mapping digital transformation, but there is a huge variance in the traction they are getting toward the outcomes they want. Just about every enterprise, regardless of industry, has stepped into the spectrum of digital transformation. What is truly challenging businesses, including healthcare organizations, is the complexity of digitizing their enterprises ― knowing how to navigate the intersection where all of these digital technologies, capabilities and infrastructure requirements come together. How do you sequence and prioritize adoption? How do you integrate and connect all of that disparate digital tech in ways that translate into a seamless value-add to your service delivery and member experience? And those questions can’t be answered in a vacuum. You have to do all of that with an eye on data security because trust is delicate, as is operational integrity and the patient/member experience. The pressure to innovate and transform in all of those areas simultaneously is a “perfect storm” of converging challenges. But it’s also a convergence of opportunities.
Where do you see healthcare organizations struggling with that digital storm?
Healthcare organizations have unique challenges and regulatory boundaries that some other industries may not have, but the struggle with this converging digital ecosystem is relatively universal. When businesses first embraced the idea of going digital, there was often a quick rush to judgment — an assumption that going digital meant investing in digital tech. But you can’t achieve digital transformation from just a good mobile app and more data. Those solutions can’t just be wired onto your business. The question “What kind of tech do we need?” is now being replaced by “What outcomes are we trying to drive?” And the answer to that question means you are shaping a digital transformation roadmap with the end in mind. It means your roadmap has a destination. It also means your roadmap won’t likely look like anybody else’s.
So how does having a transformation roadmap help an enterprise effectively address digital convergence?
For starters, a transformation roadmap implies a journey, one with a starting point, a predetermined route, multiple waypoints and a destination. Even more important, you need both the culture and process to rapidly learn and adjust your direction. Knowing the destination ― the operational and customer-experience outcomes you want to deliver ― enables you to find the right starting point. And for some organizations, that starting point may very well be infrastructure, but most just need to know how to use the data, systems and people they already have in ways that will generate quick wins. Those wins produce the right insight into how to spend on technology in a smarter way.
That sounds like a lot of strategy ― which while necessary, can be time-consuming. Are there ways to experience some quick wins with digital strategy?
There definitely are! And that’s one of the things our innovation process at Verizon is designed to enable and accelerate. For organizations that are struggling with traction to outcomes, we can help them accelerate their digital innovation progress. We start with prioritizing those ideal outcomes, sifting through those goals to find some outcomes that can be accelerated under a “micro-experimentation” model, where we bring Verizon’s repository of innovation frameworks to the table to create a prototype for piloting, validating and scaling quickly. That helps businesses focus on some quick wins for digital innovation while strategically re-architecting infrastructure, evolving business models and addressing integration challenges along the long-term section of the roadmap.
What kind of prototypes have you been building with this approach?
We’ve been working a great deal around the customer experience and engagement driver. Across industry, this has become a competitive focus for enterprise. We’re integrating mobile capabilities with virtual reality and augmented reality applications to deliver personalized customer insights, intelligence-based brand discovery and real-time contextual experiences. This has broad potential application in healthcare where organizations are looking beyond remote engagement and patient monitoring to the patient/member experience at every access and touchpoint across the organizational brand. Customer experience will be an increasingly significant differentiator for healthcare brands. But CX is not our only innovation focus. We’re also innovating around business transformation and infrastructure, for which all businesses need support building strategy right now.
“The pressure to innovate and transform in all of those areas simultaneously is a ‘perfect storm’ of converging challenges. But it’s also a convergence of opportunities.”
- FORREST CARR, VERIZON ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS
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About Verizon Enterprise Solutions
Verizon Enterprise Solutions helps clients improve customer experience, drive growth and business performance and manage risk. With industry-specific solutions provided over the company’s secure mobility, cloud, strategic networking, Internet of Things and advanced communications platforms, Verizon Enterprise Solutions helps open new opportunities around the world for innovation, investment and business transformation. Visit www.verizonenterprise.com to learn more.
