Although Digital Transformation is a long-time project for any company, there is one thing that matters more than the rest: the speed of this transformation. Once customers have gotten used to the most comfortable way of doing things, like getting your products always by tomorrow, ordering a car or your food with one click, they are not going back to the “old ways”. Even if this “old ways” are only three months back.

And this is something that puts companies under a lot of pressure, because they have to keep up with the speed things change. But in a way that will offer a long-time solution to today’s short-term requirement or problem. Decision time for companies is getting less and less. And with fast decisions, come bad decisions. Or, at least, incorrect ones.

That is the main reason why companies have to change their ways completely, in order to adapt their processes to the shortened decision time, development time and implementation time. And what is more: the shorter lifespan of the product or service they will put on the market, because it is going to superseded, for sure, in no time at all. The goal, in all of this, is to be the ones that put out the new product that substitutes the previous one.

Digital transformation is all about coordinated long-term planning and short-term delivery

Although this looks like kind of a dangerous race to an uncertain destination, it is no different from what has been happening on the markets over the past 100 years. Someone invents a new product and, invariably, someone else is going to put a better one out eventually. The element that has changed, is the time-span in which all of this happens. Our value propositions simply (although there is nothing simple about it) must help to solve customer’s needs or problems. Therefore, we have to implement mechanisms that allow us to find these value propositions in time to do something meaningful about it.

I know it’s a tall order, but this years’ DES2019 will provide many of the answers CEOs, CTOs, CIOs and CMOs are looking for, in order to make the next step in their Digital Transformation process a safe one, and in the right direction.