Excellence in digital transformation comes from marrying organizational objectives and capabilities with user needs, objectives, and jobs-to-be-done, while leveraging technology to accelerate all facets of product and service development.

This necessitates identifying and intimately understanding the diverse markets your organization serves, defining outcomes over features, and defining technologies and processes that optimize your organization toward improved decision-making.

In short, your organization risks profound disruption if technology isn’t a core competency.

The facets of digital maturity

Digital transformation is difficult because it covers so many factors, from research to systems architecture to continuous improvement. In total, there are 7 primary factors your organization needs to develop as core competencies:

1. Research
2. Product strategy
3. Interaction design
4. System architecture
5. Build
6. Launch and promotion
7. Continuous improvement

A typical digital project will include this depth of requirements and the skillsets required to execute effectively across these standards of practice. Within each of these areas, there are a series of capabilities and requirements to consider, as detailed in our article, “Why digital excellence is so hard to achieve.”

If your technology decision-making and operational practice are not yet mature, you may find these common challenges familiar.

Typical challenges of achieving digital excellence

1. Having limited capability in any one of the 7 key areas, where it is difficult to execute well and project team expertise is not deep enough to achieve best practices. This can increase cost significantly upfront or over time and diminish the value of products and services.
2. Trusting a single vendor to have the capability of executive across all 7 of these multi-disciplined steps, each of which requires a high level of expertise.
3. Taking a technical or engineering-driven approach led by features-first and, at best, internal definitions of need instead of taking a human-centred design approach that identifies user jobs-to-be-done and outcomes to align organizational goals and user needs.
4. Transitioning from research and strategy to product. Bridging the gap between identifying an opportunity to improve customer experience or service delivery and how this is translated to service models and products requires a unique set of cross-functional capabilities.
5. Not aligning information architecture and interface design to user mental models rather than feature lists and organizational requirements.
6. Not effectively translating from design to code, with optimized and accessible front-end code that puts the user first, where typical engineering- team capabilities are most robust at the architecture and back-end, instead of at layers where users interact.
7. Minimal continuous improvement. Using the knowledge gathered from every click and communicating with users on an ongoing basis is essential to improve service and product.
8. Lacking effective, ongoing technology decision-making. The ability to track performance, effectively run user tests and experiments, learn from data and insights, and make the most effective decisions on spending ongoing resources to drive adoption and engineering improvements.

Ultimately, success in the connected age requires a breadth of expertise and a depth of digital maturity and capability to maintain market-leading product, service, and customer experience standards.

We’ll help you grow your digital maturity towards improved product, service, and organizational decision-making

Learn more about digital excellence and our organizational needs and digital maturity assessments service, or get in touch to discuss how we can help you optimize how you work towards reduced product and service development costs and improved customer experience.

Get in touch

The post The role of technology in building market leading organizations appeared first on Say Yeah!.

The Say Yeah team visited throughout the week to support our peers, collaborators, and clients from The Moment, August, OCAD, Rogers, and more. We explored some of the over 50 exhibits, 125 speakers, and 40 workshops, capturing some of our experience with our day at EDIT video from October 6, 2017.

At EDIT, the future was palatable.

On October 6, a thrilling talk by Nyla Ahmad, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Marketing at Rogers Communications, focused on the future of enterprise, and the toggle between innovation and invention. She spoke of the wave of women in the past and present who are making a difference in the technology sector, as well as the heavy impact that artificial intelligence is expected to make in Canada.

A great panel spoke on drones and their ability to significantly impact the future of healthcare. The possibility of drones saving lives by way of delivering blood to remote communities was a hot topic of discussion. A possible future, that’s actually happening today.

See Zipline in action in Rwanda as they overcome geography to deliver safe blood with their drones.

We believe opening such an iconic event to the community, including industry professionals, families, students, designers, and inventors will contribute to a stronger, well-informed, and engaged society. Seeing such promise in technology and objectives both locally and abroad only serves to fuel passion in business and society.

After a glimpse of what is to come for health, education, and poverty reduction, and other essential pillars of life , there’s no doubt we’re on the cusp of another technology renaissance that can shape a better world.

EDIT, Design Exchange, and the United Nations Development Programme (UDNP) partnered together to establish this festival in hopes of inching closer to meeting sustainable development goals with technological innovations.

EDIT took a comprehensive look at both a local and global future across a variety of human, urban, and technology tracks. Ultimately, it set an inspiring foundation that segue to the exponential future explored at the SingularityU Canada Summit, October 11 and 12, 2017.

The future is here, and it’s just getting started.

We’ll help you navigate the right now and a changing tomorrow with forward thinking strategic work that returns results today.

Get in touch

The post EDIT Recap: Exploring the Expo for Design, Innovation, and Technology, October 6, 2017 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Intellectual influence is the ability to dissolve disciplinary boundaries.

From The Anatomy of Influence, as referenced by Ben Thompson, who continues:

Influence lives at intersections. Yet, as an industry, it at times feels the boundaries we have built around who makes an effective product manager, or programmer, or designer, are stronger than ever, even as the need to cross those boundaries is ever more pressing.

I’m sharing this here in the spirit of promoting cross-discipline collaboration and to encourage all of us to consider the value of learning and gaining experience from outside the technology sphere.

Many of us on the design side know to read, learn from, and hire philosophers, sociologists, and other students of behavioural science to better design for and connect with users. And there’s a lot more to be said about drawing knowledge from outside our intellectual sphere.

An interesting note in Ben’s piece: there was only one technology company that would offer him an internship following a degree in Political Science, six years of living abroad, and while working through his MBA. That company was Apple, where Steve Jobs shared during the iPad 2 keynote:

It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.

The post Technology Is Not Enough appeared first on Say Yeah!.

When Carlin Isles takes a pass from one of his teammates and blazes past the other team, it’s clear he’s playing an entirely different game than the other 13 players on the field…innovation causes disruption.

He continues:

The combination of speed and size that he brings to the game is a disruptive innovation and opposing teams will have to change the way they play when he’s on the field.

Something to keep in mind while you’re building a product business.

The post Jason Kottke proves that innovation causes disruption with a rugby observation appeared first on Say Yeah!.