Adrian Watkins

Businesses from every industry are quickly engaged on a battleground where legacy business models are bound to fail or stay behind and digital transformation brings an incredible potential for growth and profitability.

Technology, without a doubt, plays a critical role in enabling such change, but technology alone does not guarantee transformation. This journey must embody our vision for the future of our organizations and the core values ingrained in our leadership and talent.

Digital transformation is no longer a nice-to-have conversation—it’s a must-have reality. While the digital universe continues to reshape every facet of our businesses, markets, and industries, we should ask ourselves some tough questions:

• What is the opportunity with digital transformation about?
• Do we really understand the urgency?
• Are we making the right investments now and ready to seize this remarkable opportunity?

Digital transformation is about having a bold vision
If we imagine our company as a vehicle and business drivers as the wheel, it’s clear that digital transformation isn’t about reinventing the wheel. Rather, it’s an opportunity to transform the purpose of that wheel to disrupt the way we do business in the digital economy.

With a bold vision, companies can articulate a new and distinct business value proposition of their core values and translate it into a well-defined, holistic strategy with a sharp focus, executable parts, and measurable milestones. This mindset does not represent empty promises of future currency; it’s a commitment and strong leadership in the here and now to invest and drive change.

Built on foresight into how we can deliver exceptional value and outpace our competition, digital transformation extends past the edges of existing business models or organizational boundaries and reaches across partners, ecosystems, and networks.

Digital transformation is about creating the next opportunity
Digital transformation is not a backward-looking reaction to a shift in marketplace or in consumer demand. Instead, it’s about igniting forward-looking innovation to discover and deliver unique value with empathy for that one reason a business exists: the customer.

However, to take advantage of this incredible opportunity, we must shift our thinking about innovation because it’s no longer enough to just connect the existing dots.

Rather, we must find and create new ones. We must ask questions before we think about them and before customers know, ask, or simply demand them. It’s as much about anticipating the next dot while looking at existing ones as it is about creating the next opportunity before it appears on the map.

Moreover, just asking questions isn’t enough to turn opportunities into results. We must answer them as quickly as possible and, as we promote in design thinking, fail as often and as early as possible. This is the only way we can drive growth and profitability and not let it become a lost opportunity.

Digital transformation is about leadership, talent, and culture
There is no single blueprint for digital transformation that can be applied to any scenario or business. It’s unique to the core values embedded in a business’ DNA. Our journeys will be shaped by an understanding of the forces that mold the digital economy and the impact to disrupt business models that are taken for granted. This will influence not only our customers’ behaviors, but also the demand for products and services they want and every channel through which we can deliver them.

Success with digital transformation comes only through a top-to-bottom execution of a bold vision that is implemented with the pivotal alignment of organizational digital enablers and a solid foundation to support them. Its true potential lies undeniably within the leadership, talent, and culture that make it happen.

This is why technology alone certainly does not guarantee successful digital transformation. It’s our teams’ talent, passion, and ingenuity that becomes the binding agent, which is the ultimate driver of delivering the greatest promise of digital transformation: growth and profitability.

This article first appeared here.