Series: Digital Transformation - How to achieve your digital transformation in 3 steps! 3/6

On the web there are hundreds of articles, each with the same general vision, but just as many variations in their unfolding. In this series, we do not pretend to be the holders of a secret, but simply explain the approach we have created over time.

Based on the experience we have gained through very heterogeneous projects, we have identified the three stages that we can find in any service digitization, regardless of the size of the company we work for. Whether it is a European project, a start-up project, or a semi-public project like the CICG project.

In our opinion, the three essential steps for a successful digital transition are: 

In this article, we will focus on the first step: the identification of a concrete project.  

In this first step, it is not about transforming all of your company's activities/processes at once. It's about updating the tools, offers and processes that will have the most impact on your business. This may involve digitizing an internal work process to increase the productivity of your employees, or creating a new service to provide a new offer for your customers.

Let's take here the example of the management and distribution application we created for the CICG. As a reminder, the Geneva International Conference Centre began its digital transformation a few years ago and is now one of the most modern conference centres in the world. Their event broadcasting ecosystem (Mobile Application and Management Tool) allows them to delegate the administration of events directly to their clients.

We accompanied them in the design and development of their product, which had to meet three distinct goals.

One of the main difficulties of the CICG organizers was to search for and provide information, mostly scattered, related to the events they manage. This difficulty allowed them to identify a need for centralization of information and effective communication with their clients.

Thus, the ecosystem we have created improves the daily life of these project managers by offering them a platform that centralizes all the information about the events they organize.

In addition, the solution allows them to delegate the creation of content to their clients by offering them direct and secure access to the ecosystem. This allowed them to save a lot of time on searching for information since the customer himself could provide it!

The solution integrates a web and mobile application that allows CICG clients to broadcast their events and share them with their participants. The goal is to provide a direct communication channel with participants to share with them various news, last minute notifications, and even a satisfaction survey at the end of the event. All this information is entered into the management tool by the client itself or the event organizers. They are thus in control of the data shared with the participants and can send them last-minute information via notifications.

Conference participants have access to the full program and up-to-the-minute information from their smartphone by receiving notifications. It also allows them to get in touch with other conference participants while staying in control of their visibility. Finally, they have access to a whole range of practical information to facilitate their stay/participation.

Each of these objectives was intended to improve one area of the CICG. Thus, improving the life of project managers involved a pivot in project management and brought a new dimension of management: it can therefore be said to be an internal transformation. In addition, the new application has brought added value to CICG's clients and conference participants using the mobile and web applications. It was therefore also a transformation of the user experience. All in all, this stage of the digital transformation undertaken by the CICG will have had a positive impact on both their project managers and their clients.

Successfully completing a step of digital transition means first of all asking yourself the right questions and identifying your objectives. Do you want to improve your productivity or offer a new user experience? In most cases, an "internal" transformation of the company often influences the "external" sector as well (customers, end users) and vice versa. So, by determining your priorities it will be easy to lift the veil around the strategy of your transformation and move on to the next step.

In the next article, we will talk about the second mandatory step to succeed in your digital transformation: The ideation process and the identification of the actors that must participate to it.

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