So what does digital transformation mean? A lot of people, when they think of digital transformation or digital communications, digital presence, think exclusively about social media and the outward facing things. That is absolutely true. So if you are a store, if you are an e commerce company, the customer experience might mean taking those capabilities online. Allowing your customers to have a whole new channel to be able to access you. That absolutely is a no-brainer in terms of customer experience. But there are broader questions around how do you do that. And broader questions around how can digital transformation affect the company as a whole. Not just that consumer facing part of you, not even just that corporate reputation facing part of you as well. So what are you doing to bring those things throughout the company, throughout operational process? And how are those things affecting your business model? I think if you look at some examples for how different companies have done these things, it's really interesting to look at an e-commerce company like an Amazon or someone else that has an in person store and then allows online ordering. To look at somewhere where digital transformation has had a real effect on operational process and to look at to look at a business where digital has completely transformed their business model. So I just want to take a minute and talk about e-commerce for customer experience, about some issues in healthcare, for operational process. And about media in terms of the changing business model for how digital has transformed that business. So take a look at customer experience. I, for example, I am a huge fan of being able to source things online. It doesn't mean that I don't go to stores. It doesn't mean that I don't still go to H&M. So before we move on from this life, I just want to take a bit of time to go into three examples from three different industries about what digital transformation has meant for those companies. So taking a look at customer experience at the end of the day, we're all customers, for one thing or another. And I think we have all experienced as well a very simple transformation where a store like H&M has a presence in person and has also added to that a presence online. So simplifying what the customer is able to experience by being able to source the same products online as in the store, and also being able to source a wider range of things in some instances. Taking a look at operational process, my core experience is really in healthcare. Where healthcare obviously is an extremely long standing with extremely embedded processes, and it is a bit slow to change, to be fair. But what we're seeing now is great progress towards operational processes that are being transformed by digital. So not having to send a letter from your GP to a specialist, from your primary care doctor to a specialist to be able to get an appointment. By changing that and transforming that process to make it quicker to make it easier to make it digital, which saves everybody time and costs. So these systems are being adopted in the US there being adopted in the UK, there being adopted all over the world. And it's just things that are obvious that are being used in other industries and are now that they are being used in healthcare, are having a massive impact on the operational process within that industry. And I think something else that we're really familiar with as well as consumers of news is how has digital transformation changed the business model of media. It wasn't that long ago that we received newspapers to our houses. It wasn't that long ago that we consumed news by reading it by seeing it on TV by talking to people at work. All of those things still happen. But I don't think there's one of us that hasn't been touched by reading news on our phone, by getting by reading news online, by reading online papers. And the question for that for for media and that industry is how do they go to whether consumers already are? And then how do they monetize that? How do they make that part of their business model? And some are doing that better than others. And I think we can each tell which ones are doing well. Which ones meet our needs and which ones are we willing to pay for subscriptions for? So I think across all of these very different industries, digital transformation means something very different. So for your own industry, for your own business, it's about looking at what other people are doing, learning from what are the parts that work for them? What are the parts that might work for us? What can we learn and making those things a part of your business at the core, not just tacking on. We will also have a PDF of our newspaper on the website because that's not what digital transformation means. What digital transformation means is redesigning that process. Redesigning it for consumers, redesigning it for your revenues, redesigning it for your business model of how can we take advantage of this? And how can we service our customers in the way that they want to be serviced both inside the company through operational processes? Through things that might not directly touch consumers and outside the company with things that they directly interact with on a daily basis? So why is digital transformation important? In some of those previous examples, we've talked about the importance of connectivity with customers, colleagues and suppliers. And in the Burberry example, we talked about innovation of new products, business models, operating models. Some things that we haven't touched on yet but we'll get to a bit later our automation and decision making. By definition, digital allows you to take some of the work that people are doing in an analog paper based way and automate some of that. Is it appropriate to automate 100% of it? Probably not. And we've seen some some examples in the very recent past where Facebook has tried to automate, completely automate, the top things that we're trending and the result was not good. So there is a degree of automation that is available and should be taken advantage of. But to completely put things in the in the hands of automation without human oversight, at least at this point, is probably not the way to go. But who knows how things will go in the future? This is also a really exciting area of medicine as well. So there are a lot of places in medicine where where automation and digital based transformation can have a huge impact. Are we at the stage where it's going to completely replace doctors? Of course not. Two areas that we haven't talked about yet much in our examples are automation and support and decision making. We've seen some interesting examples in the really recent past, within the past month or so. Where Facebook tried to automate, completely automate, the way that they choose topics for their trends in the upper right of their of their news feed. And the result was not good, entertaining for some, but generally not good. So at this stage we're at right now, obviously automation can have an impact and can take away some of those some of the manual analog activity that frankly, people don't need to be doing. But at this point, we still need human oversight on quite a lot of things. And I don't think we want to completely abandon that for some time. But there's no question that it can automate a lot of the processes that we spend time on, and that's time, money and resource in general. One area that I have intimate knowledge of where that is going to have an impact and is in the process of getting there really is in medicine. Where there was an article in Forbes maybe about a year 18 months ago with quite an attention grabbing headline of saying computers to replace 70% of what doctors do. And a lot of people view that as a negative to know that our doctors will be replaced by computers. Who wants to be treated by a computer? But having been a doctor having gone through medical school, I think that is an absolutely fantastic thing. Because often 70% of the things that we do can be done by someone else, can be automated, can be streamlines, that we have more time to spend with our patients. We're not there yet. There is just an article, and I guess it was JAMA or another another journal this week, putting diagnostic computers more or less head to head against doctors, and doctors still consistently outperformed them. But I don't think anyone would argue that both in medicine and lots of different sectors, there is a much broader role for automation of lots of processes than we're currently seeing. The key is just how you execute that, how you put it into practice and how you put that on a system. How you embed that within the current system, to learn to get that data, to bring up that automation to a spot where it actually can start replacing things. And then over time, how can that drop off and how? How can the human interaction drop off to an appropriate level? And where can you deploy that within your organization for much greater impact? So I think this is a really exciting the area, and we're all learning along the way. We're all learning from different sectors, but it's definitely somewhere that's going somewhere in the future. But the thing that's here right now is decision making. How do you make decisions without data? I don't understand it. A lot of people seem to do it, but something that's going that can have an impact today is having more information, more data on which to base your decisions. And nothing sets you up for that better than digital transformation for both internal processes within your company and for external processes and accessing external audiences. So just formalizing that a bit more. MIT has come up with their nine elements of digital transformation in those same pillars that we've been talking about. So transforming customer experience, transforming operational processes and transforming business models. Transforming customer experience we're breaking down into customer understanding, top line growth and customer touchpoints. Customer touchpoints is a lot about what online e-commerce gives us. And it also circles back to that customer understanding. It's very difficult to judge in a store beyond football how long people are spending, many items are they looking at. But by having that cut by having that customer touchpoints online, you can access a deeper level of customer understanding for your clients. That can help you create better products for them and can then underpin top line growth so they're all connected. In terms of in terms of transforming operational processes, there are so many industries that will benefit from process digitization, which leads to worker enablement and performance management. Again similar to the customer experience, it comes back to data. It comes back to understanding what's going on and then understanding where you can make that better. Where are some areas of your own business doing better or worse than other areas? And then asking and answering that question of why is that so? If you're talking about healthcare, it might be well, why, with a similar patient population is this hospital massively outperforming this one? And there might be basic reasons that explain that, and there might be some other things that are a bit under the surface. But the point is that when you digitize processes, you do enable workers to work in a different way. And you do enable some more performance management to be able to get insights into how things are going. And that unlocks the possibility to help things go better. And in terms of transforming business models, MIT breaks it down into digitally modified businesses, new digital businesses and digital globalization. And each of those concepts I think we see very clearly in terms of how media is moving. Look at what the BBC is today versus what it was 20 years ago. Look at what the Guardian and The New York Times are today versus what they are 20 years ago and try to imagine what they'll be 20 years from now.
