Digital Evolution

"You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work your way back toward the technology –not the other way round"

Steve Jobs

When talking about digital evolution, it is often common to focus on technological evolution, the provision of new technologies (big data, connected objects ...). In short, we innovate and modernize in order to be more efficient. But it goes further and mindsets play an essential role in its understanding.
Digital evolution is thus much more than the accumulation of isolated actions, e.g. presence on social networks, use of digital media, introduction of new technologies in the enterprise.

Becoming a "digital" company demands above all an evolution of mentalities and a real willingness to change in order to adapt to a constantly changing environment.

Human resources must be at the heart of digital transformation. The anticipation of customer needs, the evolution of a business model, the efficiency of the work of employees, the facilitation of a service: all these elements will contribute to the digital evolution of an organization. It is therefore necessary to carry out this "revolution" as a comprehensive (potentially global), holistic, and above all cultural innovation. Digital and technological developments are only a mandatory contribution to achieve this.

In an organization, this leads to changes at all levels:

  • Processes (changes in the tasks of each),
  • Organizational (changes in roles and responsibilities),
  • Cultural (appropriation of a new business model).

On this fascinating journey, we assisted and supported our clients by delivering services for 


Program & Project Management

To drive the change customers expect we are often asked to take on the project or program manager role. Besides the lack of internal resources, in a tight economic context, companies are challenged by the need to revisit and better manage their projects.

RIMOC supports them in both areas, project management and program (combining several projects that contribute to the same objective) management. Depending on the customer, we choose the project management methodology most suited for the particular scenario.

Independent of the particular project challenge and methodology chosen, we try to base all actions on an action plan in order to generate meaning, to propose a convergent vision and, consequently, to encourage the support of employees for this usually digital evolution.
One of our guiding principles for successful completion of project is to turn affected people into participants.


Digitalization

As of now, there are at least three different and unfortunately interchangeably used terms in this area of digital evolution.

  • Digitization
  • Digitalization
  • Digital (business) transformation

In short, digitization refers to the process of converting an analog signal into a digital signal. This technique makes it possible to store documents, whatever their nature or medium (paper, microform or analogue audiovisual recording), in an electronic form allowing it to be processed.
Applied to a process, digitization can also describe the provisioning of digitized data (converted from analog sources), allowing the subsequent automation of such, usually already existing process. As such, it is a precondition for digitalization.

Digitalization, on the other hand, focusses on something completely different. At its core and from a business perspective, it describes the conversion of a business process or model into a (ideally) purely digital one. This extents to all contributing and affected parts of the business process or model, its related functions, internal data flows, and data exchanges. In most cases, this is not a 100% conversion, requiring interfaces to assure continued interaction with the physical world. 

To support this digital evolution, both digital technologies and digitized data (resulting from digitization, if not natively available) are leveraged.

Last, applying digitalization not only to one but to many or eventually all of your enterprise processes leads to digital (business) transformation, creating a digital business.

Based on our vision statement, that “the successful operation of a modern enterprise is best driven by an organizational structure whose primary responsibility focusses on optimization and control of information flow”, we have always envisioned the digitalization as the most efficient and effective approach to execute state of the art IT advancements.

We support our customers to

  • Create a digital strategy;
  • Transform data and data flows into purely digital ones, creating digital data (aka digitization);
  • Review and adjust processes to become pure (as far as this is possible) digital ones (aka digitalization).

 

Doing so, we always try to overcome the potentially perceived threads by staff, like the

  • Dread of technological change, 
  • Loss of human contact,
  • Fear of no longer having any added value.

Long-term communication, before, during and after deployment of digital projects is essential for a lasting cultural change in digital evolution.
Of course, sponsors and company executives, above all, must bring this digital evolution and this change of course towards digital business.

Digital evolution is a complex and rapid dynamic process that requires both personalized support by and for the staff affected to ensure its success. Awareness and the involvement of the management is essential in order to get the employees to be open-minded and thus project themselves in a seductive future.


IT Service Management

Not only to truly sustain and further Digital Evolution across the information technology realms of your enterprise, efficient and effective IT operations also require a well-honed IT Service Management (ITSM). 

Living at the heart of your IT department and providing the lively glue between the business, representing your customers, and the delivery side of your IT organization, mastering ITSM is paramount to continue to be accepted as on a par with other business divisions in delivering value for the enterprise.

Together with our customers, RIMOC has been working on many different facets of ITSM and delivered solutions to conceptional drafts entrusted to us. Across various frameworks and standards, including

  • Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), 
  • ISO/IEC 20000,
  • Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF),
  • Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT),

and taking into account the existing process and delivery maturity of the IT organization, we created, implemented, and trained well-adapted ITSM core management functions like 

  • Service portfolio management,
  • Service level management,
  • Various operational management tasks (incident, problem, event) and request fulfilment,
  • Service desk,
  • Change, security, capacity management,

and established functions like using a service design package for efficient service introduction and deployment. 
This was delivered for local organizations, operating only at one site, but as well as for multinational and global enterprise.