Excerpts from an article by Joe McKendrick in Forbes

I recently had the chance to explore the promises of digital transformation with Rajan Kohli, senior vice president and global head of Wipro Digital. You might assume a leader of a tech-driven organization would be pushing technology front and center. But Kohli sees the world for what it is. “It is a common misconception that digital transformation is all about ‘going digital’ – forcing every facet of the business to be digitized,” he says. “Organizations should instead be focused on re-imagining experiences and outcomes first.”

Where to start then? There is only one place where companies should always stay focused — on the customer. If a company has poor customer service, digitizing its internal operations will not improve that service. “Make the customer and his or her interactions with a product or service the starting point for digital efforts,” Kohli advises. “Many businesses become blinded by the constant overload of new technologies that they fail to correctly assess the value that each new technology will bring and tie it back to the customer’s journey. They let technology lead them, rather than being led from the outside-in and by customer insights, experiences and expectations.”

Ultimately, organizations need to constantly re-evaluate and be ready to change how they work – ranging from processes, to organizational teams to ways of working, Kohli points out. “Being digital requires so much of the enterprise to evolve.” Look at the lessons learned from previous technology waves — such as the shift to packaged software and ERP, he says. “The biggest lesson is a company needs to disrupt its own business or it will become obsolete,” he says. “Most incumbents in previous technology waves failed to grasp the significance of a subscription economy based on cloud and SaaS. As a result, they fell behind cloud-first players and saw erosions in their own market. In the past, technology projects meant one-off technology implementations or integrations often limited to a specific function, market segment or channel. Today, enterprises are realizing that going digital requires end-to-end-transformation – with all teams onboard.”

Read the full article on Forbes
And check out Zuora’s guide on The Enterprise Shift to Subscriptions: Lessons from PTC