How To Digitize Business Operations - Public and Private Sector

CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture

Here are some insights on how to digitize your business?

All Enterprise Transformation will need to start with culture first.  

Although we are also transforming customer journeys and processes—we believe most of digitization efforts will be spent on advancing the culture mindset, automation, advanced analytics, and systems thinking. 

About 85 percent of the world’s senior business leaders are prioritizing business digitization around these areas to avoid a loss in their competitive edge and their company profits. That’s why many leaders in both private and public sectors are looking to expedite the Digitization of their Business Enterprises’ Operations.

We see organizations pursuing a change in this type of operational productivity and customer experience now more than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic. By scaling digital strategies across multiple enterprises, our clients realize new value will arise from these changes by adopting these several shifts:

SHIFT THE CULTURE MINDSET

Start with a focus on Leadership, talent, and culture.  Build the mindset with your Leadership team towards having a commitment and awareness of trends and opportunities both past and present.  Hire a workforce that is skilled at Technical implementation and Strategy.  This will require you to establish programs to attract, train and retain digital workers.

MAKE DATA-DRIVEN DECISIONS

Build your data platform early on to take advantage of using advanced analytics to track, visualize, optimize, predict and make comparison to drive future decisions. Data is supreme when it can be converted into actionable insights, and that impact is sustained by developing skills and structures throughout the organization.  

USE TECHNOLOGY TO AUTOMATE@SCALE

Systems Thinking is key to knowing how to Automate workflow areas to increase the opportunities of using artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize and simplify the use of complex systems in order to make your business operations easily accessible.

TARGET AN END-TO-END CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 

Focus on crafting your customer journeys using new operating models that combine digital technologies and operational capabilities seamlessly. When creating a customer journey you’ve got to consider the big picture. The Customer experience is a cumulative impact; it considers all the touchpoint of your business and the relationships (or lack thereof) it fosters.

Remember

The digitization of your business operations should include staff from a variety of teams, as you want to deliver an end-to-end customer experience. As a result, you’ll need to compile and establish a group of transformational leaders to digitize your business processes. This will be a productive team of talented people from across departments with strong communication skills.

CultureSparq is a leader in helping companies transform through the digital age by helping CEOs make changes in operational productivity and the customer experience. Our Digital Strategist are working at scale throughout enterprises from around the world to deliver new value from these changes towards the Digitization of their Business Operations.

Schedule some time with me to learn how we are mobilizing a winning culture towards a digital enterprise.

We Build The Culture!

Unified Commerce Transformation

How to build a Unified Commerce Culture

C-Suite leaders, how are you preparing to take your company to the next level towards providing a Unified Commerce experience?

We know culture is one of the biggest barriers to scaling any transformation. Culture is perceived to be a massive undertaking and often hard to change. Attributes that may be culture barriers for some are, in fact, enablers for others.  As part of the C-Suite, you should focus on mobilizing a purpose and beliefs to drive culture change. 

Determine the purpose of the company, what it yields for the world and what the beliefs are of the people coming to work each day can build the culture away from a barrier to an accelerator.

As we all are aware, Unified Commerce gives your customers a constant experience across multiple channels and by building an unified commerce culture you will have employees engaged in making use of a single, incorporated, real-time platform for all customer engagement points.

Gartner research suggest, the right culture is one of the most important requirements to achieve digital transformation. Along with Gartner, CultureSparq predicts in 2021, C-Suite leaders like CIOs, CDOs and CSOs will be as responsible for culture change as chief HR officers.

When there is change there is always some chaos. This requires bold leaders who think and see things differently to approach a culture transformation as an enabler to increase innovation and speed but to also save money.

If you’ve already decided that you need to change aspects of your organization’s culture, there are some key steps CultureSparq can help you to take that will ensure your culture transformation gets off on the right foot. 

You will need the right organizational leaders to drive the success of a culture transformation. They must provide the support employees require to begin making behavior changes, and they can help move the entire organization toward the new culture. 

Here are three strategies C-Suite leaders can ponder to prepare for a culture transformation towards a unified commerce experience:

1. Design a New Operating Model by transforming the business model or optimizing the existing one to deliver a commerce strategy at scale for todays market challenges. Unified Commerce requires a well designed Enterprise Operating Model Perspective to optimize operational costs, improve product traceability and availability, and increase customer satisfaction. 

2. Mobilize a Culture of Innovators by leveraging an innovative mindset and technology to optimize delivery and customer experience.  If you want to innovate, it’s important to build diverse talented teams and for you to be closer to what your company does to better understand the delivery experience.  

3. Transform your Communication Strategy by leading major changes across the organization to allow the entire company to participate, grow and succeed collectively in the decisions making process and get rewarding for the progress. You will have to quickly move towards a change management on steroids to make quantum improvements towards operational performance by reengineering key business functions with hyper-communication strategies.

Remember

These three strategies need to be at the heart of any C-Suite retailer’s Unified Commerce strategy. Without these strategies, you will be unable to put in place the organizational structure needed in order to better serve your customers and lead the way towards deploying an efficient Unified Commerce experience.

Schedule some time with me today, to learn how we are driving Unified Commerce transformational outcomes. 

For more insight, download our 4Cs of Connected Commerce white paper.

We Build The Culture 

Boosting Your Company Productivity

Here’s How Our Distributed Teams Can Boost Your Company Productivity

Having remote teams distributed around the world has a myriad of benefits when it comes to retaining employees and building a strong team. CultureSparq built our workforce to be highly skilled and efficient at working in a distributed way so they can meet the demands of the challenging work we do with startups and Fortune 500 companies.

While many companies are focused around the challenges of working with distributed teams — we want to share our experience and benefits encountered of being distributed and how it outweighs the challenges you may be facing.

8 Exciting Reasons Companies Like Working With Our Global Teams

• We’re Highly Skilled In E-Commerce. Our teams our on a continuous learning journey to grow e-commerce industry through culture, data and technical excellence.

• We’re Super Engaged: Our teams has a sense of accountability and goes out their way to take initiative and use communication to increase their productivity.

• We Don’t Take Freedom For Granted: Our team members have incredible amounts of freedom to travel, spend time with family and participate in several other leisure activities to live a work-life balance so we are hyper-focused on making sure the work get done right and issues are resolved immediately.

• We’re Global Citizens: Our team members are diverse and speak lots of different languages which enables us to approach challenges differently. We are learning so much about the world which allows them to bring in unique perspectives to your solution.

• We’re Intentional About Our Team Synergy: Our Teams build a culture of trust by traveling the world to work together multiple times a year for exploratory reasons to keep ourselves mobilized at transforming companies as growing as subject matter experts.

• We Keep You Covered: We have teams spread across different regions and time zones to provide businesses with a great ability to have better coverage in this global environment 24/7.

• We’re Customer Focused: Before we start any project, we look to understand your customer's journey and deliver key results that differentiate your organization from your competition.

• We’re A Leaner Option: We provide companies with lower overhead options. This means companies can be a bit leaner with no office space rent, furniture cost, electricity cost, water cooler, and other expenses.

Remember 

To a small extent, work flexibility, better productivity, global coverage, and many personal benefits make distributed team one of the best business models any company may choose. It is an easy way to work with a happier workforce.

If you need to accelerate your deliverables with a high performing team or seeking a deeper understanding on how to get started, SCHEDULE some time with me.

CultureSparq is a strategy and design studio putting people at the center of everything we do.  We think carefully about shaping the culture further and how our choices might affect the various outcomes we are facing as a team each day while delivering our projects.

We Build The Culture

How To Prepare For A Culture Transformation

Business Change Requires Cultural Transformation

Are you about to embark on a business transformation?  If so, you must begin by preparing to execute a culture transformation across your organization.

In a hyper-competitive world, CEOs recognize that any significant change that must occur in business—requires a shift in the employees mindset from the conditioning of their attitudes, values, beliefs or priorities in such a way as to modify their behavior and that of the company’s culture. 

As we learned over the years, it’s less impactful to engineer a business transformation through the creation of new processes, structure or planning initiatives alone, but must be accomplished with intentional focus on people from leadership behavior adjustments to leadership actions along with your employee inputs.

As we continue to mobilize a winning culture around the world, we discovered human interaction is form of professional intimacy which shows people are not robots and could not be transformed with the deployment of tools or processes as we do machines.  CultureSparq uses both behavioral and attitudinal transformation techniques to achieve optimum performance with startups and Fortune 500 companies to attract the culture attention and increase their overall engagement.  

Here’s what you can to do prepare

1. Gather information about your existing culture

   Hire an impartial consultant to become an observer of your culture in action. Allow them to look at the employees and their interaction in your organization to learn where improvement is need for the transformation journey.

2. Develop and Communicate a Compelling Vision

   Establish a clear and compelling vision for the desired change, outline the reasons for the change, and help employees understand how the change impacts their individual roles. This includes giving all your employees the platform to express their concerns, ask questions, and get the clarity they need to support the initiative.

3. Develop a Plan and Timeline

   Map out a timeline with key milestones and an end goal where leaders can recognize and reward employee efforts, which will help build support for change along the way.

4. Help Employees Prepare

   Demonstrate empathy for employees by showing a willingness to understand their worries and concerns by providing cash incentives, appreciation letters, and other programs for your employees to help foster a sense of belonging.

5. Pinpoint where training and re-skilling is needed

   Understand and address your employee training needs early on.

6. Develop Diverse Team of Leaders Who Can Champion the Change

   Identify and send leaders within the organization to a leadership training that teaches them how to coach employees, communicate expectations, and recognize employee behaviors that support culture transformation.

7. Diagnose challenges and identify opportunities

   Figure out the root causes of issues the organization is facing and provide recommendations to improve them.

Remember

All transformation requires you to start with a Culture Transformation as the first step in your journey.  This requires commitment and understanding from organizational leaders and your partners throughout the entire process.

As with any corporate initiative, it’s important to establish a vision, team of influential leaders, plan the process, and ensure employees have the necessary training and tools to do their part to support lasting culture transformation.

We are working with companies around the world to Build The Culture.  Schedule sometime with me to learn how we can prepare your workforce for your Transformational Journey.

We Build The Culture

Rescuing Your Digital Strategy

CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture

Why Companies Are Facing A Reboot?

Digital journeys are facing many hurdles and setbacks. From restructuring leadership to demanding faster value and pivoting on failed strategies.

We understand the road to digital transformation can be filled with bumps — as well as unexpected turns — but we also know companies with a commitment of the C-suite can be one of the most crucial indicators of final success.  Which is why we recommend bringing on Digital Strategy Leaders that operate within the C-Suite to drive your digital initiatives,

Digital Strategy Leaders are needed to work with you to identify challenges and design your customer ecosystem as the catalysts for change. They will intimately research, design, prototype, and build experiences - to Sparq a digital transformation and deliver sustainable value for the company and customers.

As we are being impacted by this new reality of the COVID pandemic, companies are facing some of their biggest fears with their digital strategies from challenges of trying to do more with less, to getting large amount of work done in the shortest timeframe possible to investing in the cheapest—hopefully most qualified labor possible. 

Unfortunately, leaders are now finding they will have to reboot their digital strategy to pivot-or-get left behind but we are here to share some areas so you can stay relentless in your pursuit of becoming a digital powerhouse with some reboot insights to get you back on focus. 

Here are some lesson on a few areas digital transformation initiatives have gone awry and what you can do to avoid them.

1. Over Complicating The Digital Strategy

   Every digital transformation journey should begin with the planning of a strategy based on data and research. The focus should be on simplifying processes through technology and ensuring that every department and individual employee has easy access to information they need.  

2. Slow To Hire New Digital-Focused Leaders

   We are in a digital era with multiple new C-level titles who are data-driven and customer centric focused.  Companies need to act swiftly at onboarding leaders that can come on to simplify the organizational structure and deliver digital initiatives in an agile fashion.

3. Overuse Of The Wrong Technology

   Allowing departments to choose their own tools, sounds great but it always leads to misaligned work environments where departments are locked into their own digital silo. Use tools that remove silos.

4. The Big Rework by Investing in Low-Cost Resources

   Companies will have to partner with smaller agencies who are hyper-skilled in the areas you’re seeking to grow your investment. Hiring low-cost resources/teams with low-digital skills to deliver the work will typically result in a 30% to 50% of time spent doing rework they completed, which surprisingly is rarely measured. Start measuring the rework and invest in smaller but highly-skilled teams.

5. Having Large Amounts Of Work That Take You Off-Track

   Companies will need to have a startup mindset when delivering work—along with readjusting timelines and budgets rather than killing their digital initiatives by allowing leaders to inject large amounts of work. Focus on delivering work iteratively in smaller chunks and make the customer experience remarkable.

6. Not Choosing The Right KPIs

   Key performance indicators (KPIs) need to be chosen correctly for the project at the beginning and monitored steadily throughout. Be sure to select the correct KPIs for your business, the digital  transformation journey, and your end-users.

7. Doesn’t Visualize What Success Will Look Like

   Utilize Design Thinking to help your people visualize the flow on how the Digital Strategy will deliver something better for the customer. Creating a visual context that encompasses storytelling can even make the management of the digital transformation easier. Visually Map out your journey using a puzzle strategy as your change management to communicate the final picture.

Remember

A staggering 70% of digital transformations fail.  While most companies and executives know how crucial it is to evolve with technology and create digital processes and solutions — putting it into action is a different story. Many companies have endeavored on digital transformations, only to hit roadblocks over and over again. CultureSparq will be here to help you overcome them.

If you need to get out of your normal way of thinking and bring in some new and fresh ideas with a team of digital strategist who are successful in having different point-of-view and success at leading transformations — SCHEDULE some time with us where we will ask you some tough questions to level-up your curiosity and help you achieve the impossible in your Digital Transformation journey. 

We Build The Culture!

Think Like A CEO: 10 Bold Moves

CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture!

Boldness….if you don’t make history, you don’t exist!

Being bold requires a fearless mindset and intellectual stamina to sustain long-term growth. Although, we believe there is no single model for success. We do know, having the right mindset can make or break your career.

When I think of CEOs, certain habits, traits and practices come to mind. Things like strategic decision-making — allowing for circumstances to unfold before rushing into something, and listening to and asking for feedback to surface to make smart decisions.

The CEO Mindset is about taking time out each day to take a step back and look at the long-term direction of your business. It's about looking at the big picture and knowing how to share a compelling vision on what you're working towards.

As we help businesses transform into a new reality, we are noticing a handful of CEOs performing beyond their expectations because of the bold moves they make.

We like to share some ways to help direct your boldness on a path towards transforming your business by thinking like a bold CEO and it all starts with your Mindset which leads to the ability to acquire new skills to compete in this competitive landscape.

So we thought it would be a good idea to pick out 10 BOLD moves we see CEOs doing to separate themselves from the crowd in their Digital Transformation Journey.  

10 Bold Moves

1. Adopt a transformation mindset:  Make the transformation personal by modeling the desired mind-sets and behavior to put the transformation into focus. 

2. Cut in order to grow:  Treat your cuts as investments opportunities by investing more in other areas to move faster over time.

3. Assault the status quo: Don’t settle for the old ways of doing things, make trying new and unpopular things comfortable as a way of doing business.

4. Pursue strategic M&A and divestitures to improve the company’s portfolio: Acquire companies that spell out a common purpose can motivate, retain and align employees around long-term goals.

5. Boost productivity through digitization: Unlearn your business and use platforms to modernize your business smarter, safer and faster.

6. Do what others are afraid to do: Be vulnerable about what you don’t know and allow people who are more competent to lead conversations where you feel less informed.

7. Make a difference that benefits humanity: Let your voice be heard, but do not get so caught up in daily crises where you miss out on emerging opportunities.

8. Act Fast:  Have the willingness to take bold and rapid action to either pivot-or-persevere fast..

9. Build The Culture: Establish your brand identity, social impact and profits around your Corporate culture and use it to energize the actions and deliverables of your employees

10. Create and sell a Compelling Vision: Set aspirational targets and announced them externally.

Remember 

If you desire to make the big difference you want and what the market needs, you must practice bold leadership.  Bold leadership requires courage and a commitment to change. Genuine, bold leaders are trailblazers who create a significant paradigm shift that improves the current situation. They are the ones who Make history.

We Build The Culture