What is digital transformation? PwC Chief Digital Officer Explains. (CXOTalk

#DigitalTransformation #PwC

What is digital transformation? Here is everything you need to know. In this conversation, the Chief Digital Officer of PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Joe Atkinson, explains digital transformation. PwC is one of the largest professional services organizations in the world, with almost 300,000 employees and over $42 billion in revenue.

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Read the full transcript: https://www.cxotalk.com/episode/pwc-d...
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In this interview on digital transformation, you will learn:
-- What is Digital Transformation?
-- What is Digital Business Transformation?
-- Myths about Digital Transformation
-- What is the Connection Between Digital Transformation, Culture, and Technology?
-- What is PwC’s Digital Transformation Strategy?
-- How Important are Storytelling, Visualization, and Communication with Data?
-- How Does PwC Capture and Re-Use Knowledge Across Client Engagements?
-- Measurements, Metrics, and KPIs for Digital Transformation
-- Digital Transformation Advice for Business Leaders

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From the conversation:

What is the Connection Between Digital Transformation, Culture, and Technology?

Michael Krigsman: Why does digital transformation rest on culture and people as opposed to technology?

Joe Atkinson: If you think about this idea of, I'm going to upskill everybody and help them have a wider lens on the application of technology, first, I have to help them understand what the technologies are. Second, I have to make the investment in training them in the application of those technologies.

I can't just say, "Hey, here are the tech. You should know them." That's acumen and awareness. It's important, but I have to immerse them in the technology.

For us, that was all about data because much of our work, when we're working with clients, we're exchanging large amounts of data. We're conducting analysis on financial transactions. We're conducting analysis on capital deployments. We're conducting analysis on operational performance, supply chains, and customers.

We're dealing with massive amounts of data from massive global companies. We knew we needed people to be better with data, so we invested a lot of time, effort, and money in skilling our people in the use of data skills. But we also said, these are the data skills that we're looking for, so we gave them a frame around what we were asking so that they could direct their energies in the right place.

Then we applied what I affectionately call our accelerators, our kind of catalyst to the mix. We took 2,000 of our people. By the end of this year, it'll be 2,000 of our people. We asked them to deeply immerse themselves in the tech to really go after it. We put them on essentially two-year tours, we protected some of their time so they have learning, and we charge them with going out, engage with the teams, help them apply the new skills that they have, and help them be the catalyst that everybody wants to be to change the way work gets done.

Here's the example. In that environment, I didn't, frankly, know exactly what our people would do. We call it Citizen Led Development. It's this innovation that our teams innovate around.

One of the most successful innovations that we started with, we've had a ton since, but one of the ones that got a lot of attention early on is, we had a senior associate who was a few years into his or her career, a senior associate that actually went into our time reporting system.

We're a time managed system. We do time reporting to make sure we're being transparent and accountable with clients and with our own time. None of our people like that process. It's not a fun process. Nobody gets excited about doing that and so they built a bot, a desktop bot that helped them scrape information from the systems that the team was using at that particular account and automatically populate the time reporting system of the firm.

There's no rocket science there, but it was a pain point for our team that, with new tools, they were able to look at and say, "I'm going to go after that. I'm going to fix it." We think that, on average, that's probably saving each of our people 10 or 15 minutes a week, 50,000 people at scale.

The more important lesson from my perspective as an executive was, if the team had sent me a note or put a sourcing request in for funding to say, "I want to streamline the time reporting system," I would have said, "We've had the same time reporting system forever. It works fine. That's not where I'm going to deploy limited capital to go change a system."