{"id":19471,"date":"2018-06-08T09:48:21","date_gmt":"2018-06-08T08:48:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/?p=19471"},"modified":"2018-06-08T10:59:48","modified_gmt":"2018-06-08T09:59:48","slug":"creating-lasting-success-for-your-technology-initiatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/2018\/06\/08\/creating-lasting-success-for-your-technology-initiatives\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating lasting success for your technology initiatives"},"content":{"rendered":"

Article\u00a0 by Mpumi Nhlapo, Sales & Service Management Head: Demand Management at T-Systems SA.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

A mere decade ago, the world\u2019s biggest companies were the likes of General Electric, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil and CitiGroup. Today, that list is dominated by technology players such as Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and China Mobile.<\/p>\n

Wowed by the astonishing growth of technology-led companies over recent years, firms in every industry are rushing to digitise and transform. They are scrambling to build new apps, move systems to the cloud, and automate parts of their operations. Companies are rolling out the latest and greatest technology offerings, as the ICT landscape comes alive with rapid, relentless innovation.<\/p>\n

In this surge to digitise, however, we often see many organisations losing their way. New technology projects create additional layers of complexity, billowing costs, new security risks and confusion among teams. The impact of the new technology is quelled and we\u2019re left asking what went wrong?<\/p>\n

Through T-Systems\u2019 and Intervate\u2019s experience in handling some of the biggest and most ambitious technology programmes for large clients, we believe the problem can frequently be distilled down into one essential root cause: change management simply hasn\u2019t kept pace with the new digital era.<\/p>\n

Walking in lock-step with users<\/strong><\/p>\n

While traditional change management may have been focused on the internal awareness, enablement and upskilling of staff – in the digital era we need to broaden our focus to cater not only for internal staff, but also for the external customer.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, this process doesn\u2019t only kick-in at the end of your software development cycle, when you are ready to launch a product. In the digital world, the process of change management occurs at the very beginning of the ideation and creation phases.<\/p>\n

Design Thinking processes help us to hone in on what the customer really needs and what they feel about a particular feature, product or service. In times of escalating complexity, Design Thinking cuts through the clutter, getting to the heart of what\u2019s important to our external users. This process of engaging, co-creating and assisting them to get acquainted with a new product then continues all the way to launch and beyond.<\/p>\n

In today\u2019s world that is saturated by new digital services at every turn, simply throwing a new app into the store won\u2019t work. Instead, we need to walk in lock-step with our users, helping them to see the value of a service, designing change management and marketing strategies to stimulate adoption.<\/p>\n

In some cases, the need to nurture external adoption is even more obvious. Imagine the large, lumbering corporate that has taken some time to begin its digital transformation journey – it would come as quite a shock to users if they were suddenly presented with a range of digital services boasting leading-edge artificial intelligence, cloud, virtual reality, geolocation or similar technologies.<\/p>\n

Making things \u2018Sticki\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our approach – which we\u2019ve packaged as our \u2018Sticki\u2019 consulting and user adoption offering – harnesses Intervate\u2019s decade-long streak of award-winning IT deployments for local firms, as well as the depth of its parent company, T-Systems\u2019, global resources and capabilities.<\/p>\n

Our focus is to help organisations, their staff and their customers see the true value of a given technology or digital service – to situate it in the context of each of our individual lives and articulate the value that it adds.<\/p>\n

While in bygone industrial eras we may have all been forced to accept \u2018one size fits all\u2019 products (as organisations focused on efficiency, scale, distribution and cost-effectiveness) \u2013 this is no longer necessarily the case.<\/p>\n

Today, the game has fundamentally changed. As customers we expect highly personalised, tailored solutions that are crafted for our individual needs. We expect our voices to be heard as we type out our product reviews on eCommerce sites and contribute to company forums and beta trials.<\/p>\n

Against this backdrop, the approach to change management needs to become far more dynamic, reaching out to staff and customers alike and evoking our emotions and our imaginations. It\u2019s only by getting this right that one can hope for successful digitisation initiatives and lasting results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Article\u00a0 by Mpumi Nhlapo, Sales & Service Management Head: Demand Management at T-Systems SA. A mere decade ago, the world\u2019s biggest companies were the likes of General Electric, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil and CitiGroup. Today, that list is dominated by technology players such as Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and China Mobile. Wowed by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":19472,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4950,6,13,262],"tags":[5554,2544],"class_list":["post-19471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","category-insights","category-top-stories","category-used","tag-mpumi-nhlapo","tag-t-systems-sa"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19471"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19474,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19471\/revisions\/19474"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}