Q. Given those priorities, how are you, as Chief Digital Transformation Officer, directing your investments? How are you factoring in these significant differences in your populations and their expectations from a digital technology enablement standpoint?
Tarun: One hundred percent. Within the priorities in our Digital Transformation Office, I will quote a formula that we stole from someone who we know stole from somebody else. I’m not exactly sure where the true origins lie but that formula is: NT+OO=COO. Memorize that formula because it continues to keep our standards.
What does that mean? New Technology + Old Organization = Costly Old Organization.
We have a budget for digital transformation. If it was as easy as buying a technology, we would have all transformed at this point. But if you simply just buy technology and you wire it in to the existing organization, basically you’ll just be an expensive version of what you were, previously.
And if we were previously good at what we were doing, then why are we doing the digital transformation? Yeah, we try to spend a lot of our time from our priorities on understanding the operations and where lies that mismatch between what the consumer is truly asking on one end and how we provide it today. Then, we see what are the ways we can transform.
With regard to my title, Digital Transformation Officer, I would say the T in that title is the capital letter. What is the transformation that has to occur? Where does digital come into it? Where’s the operational change as a company? Sometimes it’s going to be a real problem and at others, the digital is ready while the operations is not, for the transformation. Sometimes the operations may be ready while the digital isn’t. That match is crucial. We spent a lot of time asking, “Is it ready?”, and that’s where we’ve been successful, so far.
