A comprehensive guide to enterprise transformation
Last updated: April 2024
Enterprise transformation refers to a fundamental companywide change aimed at delivering a better customer experience. That means providing highly personalized products and services faster than ever before and without hassle. Your organization might need to radically shift how it operates to not only meet, but also exceed these big customer expectations.
The concept of business transformation is nothing new. Organizations of all types and sizes must evolve to stay relevant and keep up with new demands. But enterprise transformation goes beyond implementing innovative ideas — it is really about rethinking how you serve your customers in every interaction they have with your company.
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The output of this approach is a Complete Product Experience (CPE). Embracing a CPE-oriented mindset requires long-term thinking about what customers really want from you beyond the product or service you provide today. It means thinking holistically about your teams, technology, and enterprise data — and how you can reshape the entire organization to better serve customers.
This kind of transformation is complex and requires widespread change (and buy-in) across the organization. Achieving lasting greatness requires a meaningful investment in the future. Use the following links to jump ahead to a specific section:
What is enterprise transformation?
When you think about transforming your organization, the concept of digital transformation often comes to mind first. It is all about adopting new technology and processes to modernize your business. Digital transformation has gained popularity because it promises an exciting model for innovation by offering more personalized customer experiences and organizational efficiency. But in fact, it is just one component of a full enterprise transformation.
Enterprise transformation improves customer experiences and changes how the entire company operates. It requires all three of the following components:
Digital transformation: Investing in the right technologies and processes to modernize your systems, infrastructure, and digital capabilities
Solution transformation: Shifting how you build and sell products to prioritize customer relationships and outcomes
Data transformation: Putting data and analytics at the core of your innovation and decision-making processes
These core strategies are often adopted independently, but many companies leverage all three as they work to increase the value they deliver. The grid below shares some additional details on them:
Digital transformation | Solution transformation | Data transformation | |
Focus | Incorporating technology into new and existing products | Rethinking how products are built, bundled, and sold | Gaining deep intelligence into all aspects of customer experience |
Benefit | Creating new growth opportunities and exceptional customer experiences | Serving the needs of customers in a more complete and lasting way | Faster, more informed decisions backed by deep customer insights |
Example | Domino’s Pizza created a digital platform called AnyWare to improve its ordering and delivery experience. | The shift from gas-powered vehicles to electric cars is addressing environmental concerns and changing consumer preferences. | The prevalence of tools such as Tableau and Power BI allows companies to convert vast amounts of data into actionable insights. |
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What are the business benefits of enterprise transformation?
Enterprise transformation is driven first and foremost by heightened customer expectations. However, it is also about business survival. Large enterprises with vast product portfolios can find it particularly hard to implement this level of change. But even though the effort to transform is monumental, so are the benefits you stand to gain:
Customer loyalty | The primary benefit is serving your customers better — delivering real product value that satisfies their needs. |
Strategic clarity | Enterprise transformation requires a bold vision of the future you want to achieve. Taking the time to set this strategic direction helps teams understand how to orient their work around your larger objectives. |
Operational efficiency | Transformation leads to improved responsiveness across the organization and faster delivery of products and services. But going agile alone is not a transformation — it is just one element of the transformation. |
Cost reductions | Enterprise transformation puts you closer to customers, allowing you to focus your resources where they matter most and strategically cut other costs. This includes choosing technology that streamlines processes and improves customer insights. |
Innovation | Reorienting around the customer experience reveals new insights about the future. You can anticipate new problems to solve and develop more inventive solutions. |
Engaged teams | Transformations done well bring optimism and renewed energy to organizations. Teams can see the impact of their work and understand why it matters. |
Transformation efforts are incredibly challenging and can even be emotional. Overhauling the culture and mindset of the organization means that some people will respond with uncertainty and skepticism. People might wonder how they will fit into the new environment and whether changes at the organization will stick. This is why it is important to involve everyone in the transformation — with strong leadership from the CEO and executive team.
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Who is involved in an enterprise transformation?
Every team at your organization has a role in enterprise transformation. The most successful transformations start as a clear executive mandate with meaningful collaboration across departments. Some organizations even form innovation groups or transformation teams to lead the charge. Here is a comprehensive list of the different teams to get involved and their scope:
Leadership team | Leadership sets the company vision, communicates the "why" behind enterprise transformation, and makes strategic decisions related to people, processes, and technology. Without executive sponsorship, most enterprise transformations cannot move forward. |
Product management organization | Product managers sit at the intersection of design, technology, and business. The PMO's role in an enterprise transformation is indispensable: reimagining the customer experience throughout the entire product lifecycle. |
IT | IT teams build and maintain the underlying technology that makes it possible for an organization to deliver its products and services. Engineers within IT are responsible for how the product plan comes to life. Together, the entire IT department enables faster delivery, greater flexibility, and improved reliability. |
Marketing | Marketing teams are responsible for modernizing the entire customer journey: how the organization attracts prospective customers, communicates product value, and generates new signups. In some organizations, marketing teams lead the digital side of the transformation. |
Sales | Sales teams are in charge of delivering more personalized, seamless buying experiences to customers. Many teams are reshaping sales conversations to provide an expert-led, consultative approach. |
Customer support | Customer support teams engage with customers at key milestones in the customer relationship: when customers need help or choose to upgrade, renew, or cancel. The support team is integral to the transformation; it responds quickly to points of friction and brings visibility to customer feedback. |
Legal | Legal teams ensure that new customer experiences and technologies meet compliance and legal requirements. This is especially important in heavily regulated industries, such as oil and gas, healthcare, and financial services. |
Finance | Finance teams are responsible for integrating payment systems and processes to provide a smoother customer experience. They also analyze new business models to support transformation. |
HR | HR teams strengthen employee engagement in transformation efforts. They also recruit and hire new talent who will help drive organizational change. |
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What does it take to transform your organization?
There is no quick fix when it comes to enterprise transformation — it is a yearslong, ongoing process that requires a good deal of thought and effort. Some transformations stall because the organization lacks clear strategic planning and alignment. It helps to begin with a stated set of objectives that identify where you need to improve and why. Then, as your strategy takes shape, there are six areas of change you must embrace to realize a successful transformation:
Mindset: You have to shift your focus to improving the customer experience. And this needs to be deeply understood across the entire organization — everyone needs to adopt a customer-centric mindset.
People: Identify the right people with the appropriate skills to help move the organization forward. This applies to technical skills (digital, cloud, DevOps) as well as leadership and communication skills.
Process: Select agile, lean, or DevOps initiatives to help accelerate your transformation and improve cross-functional processes.
Technology: You likely need to implement new technologies — cloud, mobile, Artificial Intelligence (AI) — to deliver the experiences that customers want.
Go-to-market: Rethink how you market, sell, and support your product or service to remove friction at each stage of the customer lifecycle.
Measurement: Reevaluate your current key performance indicators (KPIs) and choose milestones and metrics that tell a richer story about your customers.
Making effective changes across all six areas requires a far more collaborative approach than most organizations are used to. You cannot truly deliver on the promise of a CPE until you have broken down silos and embedded a customer-centric approach to everything that you do.
Create an enterprise transformation roadmap
Successful enterprise transformation requires a forward-thinking and strategic mindset. Look beyond current goals to develop a strategy that anticipates customer demands a few years ahead (as well as further into the future).
You can anchor this long-term work using a digital enterprise transformation roadmap. Guide and align all organizational efforts throughout your transformation. And stay centered on the initiatives that will help everyone see what the future has in store. Here is how to get started:
Set strategy: Define a clear vision for the future state of the organization and establish measurable goals to track progress. For transformation at this scale, this work should be measured in years and be separate from the current state of your product and business. Think deeply about the customer experience you want to offer and how digital, solution, and data transformation strategies can work together.
Engage stakeholders: In the early stages, but also throughout the entire process, identify and align with stakeholders on the strategic direction your company is heading toward. Consider all relevant groups and how they connect to one another. Keep in mind that every group that serves customer needs will need to rethink what they do.
Celebrate milestones: Planning several years into the future can be hard to conceptualize and stay energized about — progress is often slow and hard to spot. So identify and monitor key milestones on your roadmap (like the implementation of a new digital platform or technology infrastructure). Link these major milestones to the releases, epics, and major features the team is delivering against to show incremental progress.
This strategic roadmap in Aha! Roadmaps can be customized for any long-term project or cross-functional initiative.
Ultimately, all the work that goes into an enterprise transformation will help your organization become more resilient and delight your customers. To find success, stay focused on the "why" behind the changes you elect to make. Ensure that every shift ties back to delivering an exceptional customer experience.
FAQs about enterprise transformation
How can I measure the success of my enterprise transformation?
Each transformation strategy (digital, solution, and data transformation) maps to its own set of success metrics, of which there are many. The metrics you choose to track depend on how you approach transformation. Be intentional and selective with which data you monitor and keep in mind that you might need to wait a year or more to determine the real impact.
What frameworks can help guide the implementation of digital transformation?
We recommend using a digital enterprise transformation roadmap to help everyone stay aligned on all organizational efforts — both now and over the next several years. For example, a strategic roadmap in Aha! software can track progress on cross-functional initiatives within any time frame.
How can I ensure the roadmap remains effective and adaptable as the business scales?
A roadmap should serve as a common and consistent touchpoint for your team throughout your enterprise transformation. This requires regularly aligning the roadmap with your transformation strategy, planning short and long-term work iteratively, basing all decision-making on a clear set of criteria, and consistently reviewing your roadmap with leadership and cross-functional teams.
