We’ve all heard the term “digital transformation” and how it has redefined how companies ran their businesses over the last few years. But now that these companies have had years to digitally transform, what does success look like? Furthermore, what does the roadmap to success look like? For our audience at the Asana Showcase, the answer lied with keynote speaker Kory Vannoy, Director, Digital Customer Engagement at RICOH.
“Market leaders of the 20th century face legacy challenges and need to explore new paths for growth and success in the 21st century.”
In order to properly build a digital transformation roadmap or, in this case, a market-led roadmap, Kory and his team had to list the challenges they were trying to overcome. These challenges included:
- More effective collaboration
- Being able to consolidate multiple approaches into cohesive project management and commercialization process
- Creating complete and aligned full-funnel go-to-market approaches
- Simplifying the toolset to streamline coordinated portfolio and launch strategy.
Now, for companies mired in legacy platforms (and mindsets), these challenges are fairly common. After all, collaboration, consolidation, alignment, and simplification efforts are either too slow or too costly to keep up with the competition when relying on analogue approaches. The next logical step for Vannoy and his team was to look beyond the challenges and create a vision for digital transformation.
“In order to solve evolving and growing market needs and challenges, we knew that we needed to create new sustainable growth opportunities – we needed to modernize and improve our operations, and create that culture of innovation internally.”
To do this, RICOH was able to break down this vision into a 3-pronged approach:
- Create a robust portfolio to meet evolving customer needs (identify the problem)
- Renovate the brand (put controls in place)
- Create unity and vision for all teams (gain buy-in with predictability).
The first approach is integral for almost all organizations: identifying, solving, and meeting customer needs – especially in this customer-driven, digital-first world. For an innovation-driven, customer-first organization like RICOH, this was not only imperative but bled directly into their second approach of renovating the brand and bringing it up to speed with if not ahead of the competition. Lastly, Kory had to tackle the other end of legacy upgrades: the legacy mindset. This required the delicate dance of not only upskilling but unifying his teams without alienating or losing talent – a common pain point for countless organizations.
“A transformation roadmap is useless without the right platform to help guide you down the road.”
RICOH chose Asana as their digital transformation platform because it decreased duplicative work, aligned on the same language, improved efficiency and collaboration, and increased accountability. However, that just covers the process and technology. It was then up to RICOH to engage the people side of tech adoption.
According to Kory, “we modernized the tech adoption process through employee training and gamification. It was a lot of fun and full of positive energy.” Here’s Mr. Vannoy in his own words:
“Bringing it all together.”
If there was one bit of predetermined synergy amongst our audience members at the Asana Showcase, it was that they were experiencing problems with were the three biggest digital transformation issues facing organizations, worldwide: people, process, and technology. What was learned from our speakers, particularly Kory Vannoy of RICOH, it’s that a successful digital transformation roadmap does exist – and that it truly is possible to make the people, process, and technology aspects come together harmoniously. It’s up to the organization to find the right platform and approach to make it all work.
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