Defining digital transformation
No, I will not be answering the question in the first sentence like a traditional SEO article. Yes, I will make you weed through a narrative as if this is a food blog with the recipe buried at the end.
In general terms, digital transformation seems to mean how to bring your business into the 21st century. It’s a function that typically falls under IT in many organizations I’ve consulted for. But it has historically and categorically missed a big chunk of what needs to be transformed, which has left many legacy organizations spinning their wheels for the past five years if not longer.
Content as a discipline has been growing right alongside digital transformation, but not hand-in-hand. We’ve been transforming words on screens, how we orchestrate getting those words to those screens, and how we architect those words for situations where there are no screens.
But something has been missing. And consumers know.
When consumers interact with a brand that doesn’t have their digital house in order something just feels off. They often don’t know why, but they’ll be the first to tell you to avoid that brand because the app is bad, the website is useless, the emails are overwhelming, the chat bot didn’t help them at all, the list goes on.
We point fingers in various directions here—an experience wasn’t thoughtfully designed, a UI was hastily thrown together, the content wasn’t crafted for the right audience, the data wasn’t clean on the back end. But we’re still missing the point.
Digital transformation is not a platform alone. You can select the best technology product and still not have the product team to lead it. It’s not simply a process improvement. You can design a seamless and foolproof workflow, but folks still might not follow it. Which brings me to people.
People are, unsurprisingly, what matter most in the equation of digital transformation. If your culture isn’t transforming along with your technology, your organization is not moving forward.
With the proliferation of genAI, we in content and technology are finding ourselves at a delta. And that is to transform, for real this time, or watch our digital experiences crumble as we rollout tech we’re simply not ready for. And I believe, taking this lens of people, processes and platforms to our digital transformation efforts will help us right the ship.
