1. Vision, Leadership and Strategy

This is arguably the most important element of the model. The vision, leadership and strategy is the foundation on which a successful Digital Transformation process is built upon. There must be a clear vision of creating a seamless all encompassing experience for stakeholders interactions with an organisation, regardless if that's via physical or digital methods.

This must be supported by ALL ranks of an organisation, especially its leadership, who compile and agree to a detailed strategy, outlining the organisations goals and ambitions, the resources required and a road map on how these will be achieved. The strategy should be clear, concise and speak to all of an organisations employees, and even some of it's key stakeholders, uniting them towards a shared goal.

Once this key element has been achieved, the focus can shift to the second most important element - an organisation's people and it's culture.

2. People & Culture

This part forms the second phase of the foundation, for without the right people and the right culture, and organisation's vision and it's strategy are static and would remain unfulfilled. Successful Digital Transformation depends not only on leaders, but also 'implementors' and both should have a common understanding of the vision and strategy they are working to. There should be an appreciation of digital design, development and innovation processes, as well as the skills required and the people who possess them.

Unlike the vision and strategy, which will remain relatively unchanged, the people and culture element will be in constant flux, evolving over time as people (stakeholders) come and go, shaping the malleable culture at the same time.

3. Agile Innovation

The foundations have been set and the first pillar - agile innovation - can be laid. Digital Transformation brings forth radical change within an organisation, which must be embraced by their stakeholders. Agile innovation represents the adoption and continual evaluation of new technologies and ideas, which help to add value to an organisation and empower its stakeholders.

This leads to the next pillar, which supports the progression and fruition of these innovative technologies and ideas

4. Skills and Digital Capability

An organisation must have a clear picture of the skills and digital capabilities of its internal structure. It must understand how to deploy and improve these and where necessary, employ external resources, through procurement or partnership, to ensure that the organisations vision and strategy can be met. Cross Functional Collaboration may also be another innovative approach to solving any internal gaps in skills and digital capability.

5. Cross Functional Collaboration

This pillar can be seen as a facilitator of the pillars mentioned above. Organisations are comprised of smaller departments and teams, all working towards a shared goal. However, most operate as silos, performing their function over and over. In most cases an organisation can benefit from Cross Functional Collaboration, which sees departments or teams work together, outside of their silos. This allows for the sharing of skills and digital capability and agile innovation, as the whole organisation works as a single entity towards their shared vision. This can result in a dramatic improvement on stakeholders' experiences.

6. Drivers and Barriers

A digital transformation won't be plain sailing. There will be drivers, which help the advancement of the digital transformation and they'll be barriers, which have the adverse effect. It is vital to continually identify and understand drivers and barriers, applying resource to drivers to try and compound them, whilst mitigating the barriers, to lesson or remove their affect. It's important to identify what success looks like and how it will be measured.

7. Customer Journey Mapping

What lies upon the structure so far, will be Customer Journey Mapping. This element ensures that an organisations understands its stakeholders. It involves mapping, monitoring and evaluating each stakeholder group. How do they behave? How do they interact with the organisation? Do they / how do they interact with competitor organisations?

From this picture, we can work towards building on the final part of our structure, 'Competitive Advantage and Customer Engagement'.

8. Competitive Advantage and Customer Engagement

The final phase focuses on defining and redefining an organisation's competitive advantage, based on the data and information fed up throughout the structure. What can the organisation do or provide, within the means of it's resources, to exceed its customers expectations, to succeed over its' competition.

Once the competitive advantage is clearly defined, it should feed into and add value back down the structure, to support customer engagement and experience.

It is vital that data and information flow both up and down the structure, in a cohesive loop which is constantly driving the organisation forward.

Technology

Technology surrounds the structure, providing support to each of the buildings, as opposed to being one of the building blocks. Digital transformation is often misunderstood as simply 'digitising existing services and processes in a bid for organisational success' (REF). However, it's in fact about having the right organisational processes, business strategy and culture as a foundation on which to build and inform what and how digital tools should be utilised (REF).