Idea in Brief
The Problem
Many companies struggle to reap the benefits of investments in digital transformation, while others see enormous gains. What do successful companies do differently?
The Journey
This article describes the five stages of digital transformation, from the traditional stage, where digital and technology are the province of the IT department, through to the platform stage, where a comprehensive software foundation enables the rapid deployment of AI-based applications.
The Ideal
The ideal is the native stage, whose hallmarks are an operating architecture designed to deploy AI at scale across a huge, distributed spectrum of applications; a core of experts; broadly accessible, easy-to-use tools; and investment in training and capability-building among large groups of businesspeople.
Over the past decade, Novartis has invested heavily in digital transformation. As the Swiss pharmaceutical giant moved its technology infrastructure to the cloud and invested in data platforms and data integration, it recruited AI specialists and data scientists to build machine-learning models and deploy them throughout the firm. But even as the technical teams grew, managers from across the business—sales, supply chain, HR, finance, and marketing—weren’t embracing the newly available information, nor were they thinking much about how data could enhance their teams’ work. At the same time, the data scientists had little visibility into the business units and could not easily integrate data into day-to-day operations. As a result, the investments resulted in only occasional successes (in some aspects of the R&D process, for example) while many pilots and projects sputtered.
