Prudential, for example, focused on optimizing the insights imperative across business, technology, and workforce and operational strategies. When designing its algorithm to automate underwriting, they engaged underwriters to gain greater adoption and value from the transformation. Robert Huntsman, chief data scientist for Prudential Financial’s Life Insurance and Retirement business, explained, “The way they work is changing, so, knowing that, underwriters have been involved from day one in helping to write the requirements, to craft how the model works as well as in changing their own processes for how they would interact with the model. Now, for 60% of applications, you can get an expedited decision … reducing the amount of time an underwriter needs to spend on evaluating an application. That’s a huge cost saving for the company which enables us to be more price competitive and provide our customers the services they need faster.”
Alternatively, the framework can help organizations to consider building a more integrated business strategy that includes platform, insights, experience, connectivity, and integrity. Manoj Raghunandanan, president of Global Self Care and the Consumer Experience Organization (CxO) at Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health, articulated a digital transformation business strategy touching on all five of the imperatives: A platform approach to improve end-to-end data connectivity across customer insights and experience in a way that considered data integrity. He explained, “we’re focusing on connecting our organization from end-to-end to create an improved and more transparent experience for our consumers, customers and our suppliers [of] ingredients. This requires connecting all the data from the very beginning of research & development, through the supply chain, to our retail customers, and through to the consumer.
British American Tobacco and Contact Energy looked at a combination of several of the digital imperatives aligned across business, technology, and operations/workforce strategies. Elaine Chum, area head of digital transformation, British American Tobacco, North Asia, explained how she is leading her organization’s online retail platform strategy in Japan to create a direct-to-customer buying experience within the regulatory integrity requirements to drive increased sales revenue. She explains, “In today’s world, I should be able to deliver within 24 hours. We started looking at consumer experience and restrictions,” and with those three imperatives in mind, advised, “Put the consumer experience in the front, middle and back of your company’s agenda. Look at the strategy element, the internal business processes and how it can enable transformation, the technology and its platforms that we own and operate in, the capabilities that we have, talent, people, resources, [and] the organization structure” notably emphasizing the unique challenges of operating in a region that values stability over change and finding Japanese-speaking digital talent.
Additionally, Wall of New Zealand’s Contact Energy is extending the digital platform his organization initially created to optimize customer experience to reduce friction for its customer service representatives, enhancing workforce operations. Having a comprehensive, matrixed strategy in place can allow for this type of flexible, synergistic decision-making that keeps the overall organizational ambition in mind.
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