Navigating Disruption: The RevGen Perspective on Digital Transformation

“It’s really do or die,” Julie Harris, Bank of America’s Enterprise Chief Experience Officer, said of embracing the new, digital space where companies and their customers exist. She gave her talk on ‘Embracing Digital Disruption’ to members of the Colorado Technology Association (CTA), hammering home the point with a statistic to make you sit up and listen: the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 is expected to shrink from 33 years to just 12. 

As a longtime partner of the CTA, several RevGeners were in the audience nodding along with her points. Helping our clients thrive by navigating digital disruption alongside them is at the heart of many of our services. 

“A decade ago, organizations viewed digital transformation as a one-time initiative to modernize how they work,” says Noah Benedict, RevGen’s Director of Digital Enablement.

“Today, we view digital transformation as an ongoing process of self-evaluation, innovation, and reinvention that is vital for businesses to thrive in a rapidly changing world. Goals, processes, roles, strategies, tools, platforms, architectures, and technologies are all critical in any digital transformation effort.” 

Technology has long been a disruptive influence in business — the advent of the internet age has proven that a thousand-fold. Every day, it seems as if a new software or digital service is vying for a slice of an organization’s limited budget. Pero Dalkovski, Vice President of Data and Technology, acknowledges that this can complicate matters. 

“The technology landscape, and the transformative potential for businesses through technology, continues to advance at a staggering pace. Think about the innovations in AI and cloud technologies in recent years. At RevGen, we believe that successfully cutting through the hype around new technologies is key for enterprises to realize business value from the right technological advances.” 

He continues, “It’s about picking those leading-edge technologies that have proven their effectiveness and implementing them with pragmatic use cases that fit an organization’s maturity and readiness.” 

[Read how we found the right cloud technologies to help a healthcare startup reduce costs and spend more time with patients.] 

The ‘correct fit’ theme in Harris’ talk wasn’t just limited to which technologies to choose. She was very clear on one point: the return on investment in digital transformation isn’t always going to be in dollars and cents. Improving the digital customer experience can pay dividends in other ways. Stephanie Caravajal, a leader in our Customer Experience practice, agrees. 

“To embrace digital transformation means to focus your company around customer experience. As a company rolls out digital enablement efforts, they will see an increase in customer satisfaction,” she says.

“This is a period during which a customer is happy the company is providing an improved experience. Smart businesses know this has the potential to grow into a significant relationship that can increase positive word of mouth and loyalty to the brand, and ultimately increase the customer lifetime value.”

Of course, disruption doesn’t just affect customers. Sometimes, it’s about improving the employee experience. One of our clients was focused on doing just that with a recent digital transformation project that set out to make their employees’ lives easier by building a comprehensive sales enablement app. 

“To start, we shadowed the client’s field reps to fully understand the problems they had with many disorganized data sources such as service levels, customer information, geolocation, regional penetration, etc.,” says Senior Architect Kevin Able, who worked on the project. 

“From there, we took the best of that data and organized it into a consolidated, seamless experience for them. This provided the sales reps with a means to quickly access what they needed for potential new customers, cutting down on wasted time and frustration with the sales process.”      

However, none of this transformation is possible without ensuring that the new digital solution is adopted. And that takes good change enablement practices. Director of Client Success Brian Wilson has seen companies falter at this last step all too often. 

“Companies invest millions of dollars each year in internal efficiency, automation, and systems tools without considering the people-oriented project plans that include the most critical stakeholders — the end-users — in design, testing and implementation.” 

[Read more about how to reduce disruption time with good change management practices.] 

Wilson continues, “These factors introduce risk to project success, delay the expected operational and financial benefits, and can create worse customer and employee experiences. This is why we integrate change enablement into everything we do. True digital transformation includes driving adoption through stakeholder alignment and tailored change enablement intervention plans. But the most critical thing for us is that we help our clients learn how to prepare for, lead, and manage change long after we’re gone.” 

Whether we like it or not, the digital age is just getting started. The latest trends in data science, customer personalization, and extended reality mean that our lives will soon be more digital than ever. RevGen Partners is here to help our clients embrace disruption.

Some see change as a threat. We see it as another opportunity to seize.  

Interested in our perspective on your digital enablement project? Contact us to schedule a chat with one of our experts.