By Paul Bishop, Founder and MD, Splendid UNLIMITED
It may feel that our day to day lives are full of uncertainty and lack direction, however if we look hard enough, we can see a clear path that highlights the way to how our future lives will be lived.
There are solid plans in place for a new normal and as a global population, we need to follow the leaders who are bringing about the fundamental changes to the way in which we live, to understand what our future looks like.
One place where we can find such leaders planning our futures is within the World Economic Forum. It is no secret that the WEF has been planning the worldwide deployment of a range of initiatives that enable a more efficient, sustainable, economically viable, ecologically friendly and, overall fairer, global society. The initiatives, which have been laid out via ‘The Great Reset’, have clear deliverables across every industry, focussing on multiple key pillars of change including Sustainability, Economics, Healthcare and Digital Transformation.
Here at Splendid unlimited, we have focussed our thoughts on the Digital Transformation Initiative* and how this will affect the core industries that we work with most often; Retail, Finance, Healthcare and Housing. Through four video episodes of filmed conversation, we explored what each of the industries must do to create more accessible solutions, in order to keep up with the pace of digital acceleration.
Recent examples of businesses not responding to these changes came about recently in retail, with the BOOHOO acquisition of Debenhams and the ASOS acquisition of Arcadia. It had been clear for a long time that both Debenhams and Arcadia, despite having online presence, did not take the necessary steps to become fully digital and have suffered the consequences and realisation that they just can’t compete with their online competitors and counterparts.
Every retailer with physical stores, must look at how they adapt in the current environment to ensure that their customers remain loyal, despite not being able to visit and experience their branded shopping environments.
What is clear from these discussions, is that there is inevitable and urgent change required from all forms of businesses to become digital and begin to operate with less physical locations and onsite staff. It’s the way in which you approach and plan these changes that gives you a better chance of success from the outset.
What does this means for the wider business world?
With restricted international travel and entire workforces now carrying out their duties from home, now more than ever, is the time where digital comes into its own and provides truly utilitarian platforms for every industry, business and human-based transaction. Movement of people is on hold for now and many changes are taking place in the meantime, that will limit the necessity for us to do so in future.
The facilitating technologies already exist for these changes in how we work, however it is the shift in cultural, business operations and being able to carry out rapid discovery and strategic planning with clear goals and targets, that form the important process for understanding how businesses can adapt.
The process for Value-Driven, Digital Transformation needn’t be complicated from a technology perspective there just needs to be the right approach with a call understanding of how we as humans interact communicate and function. At Splendid, we call this DIGITAL MADE HUMAN.
As for enterprises, we see that digitising traditional and legacy processes is inevitable, yet not something that should be feared or avoided. For the past 15 years we have worked with a range of clients from various industries to put in place or such digital solutions and platforms that were previously considered to be unobtainable or not worth the investment.
We have continued to prove that change, through digital, brings effectiveness and efficiency that traditional approaches just can’t achieve.
