Grupo Dpaschoal

Suppose we do a quick google search for the term “digital transformation” today. In that case, we have a return of more than 665 million pages, and many of these pages begin with the question, “What’s digital transformation?”

This is a question that I have faced over the last few years and has become more common with the advent of the pandemic (COVID-19). However, I believe that the main question should not be this, but how to direct the human resource (which I will call "BIO" also in this article) to understand people's problems, transform the min into challenges and solve them through the technology available?

We need to understand how to act intelligently and have humans thinking more broadly about how technology can be used to solve challenges.

We can highlight some cases where technology was applied; however, the business model didn’t succeed well.

An example of this was the NOKIA case; as of January 2006, it was one of the world's biggest cell phone makers. It was a respected and powerful company and was valued at 140 billion dollars.

In 2007, shortly after Apple launched the iPhone, Nokia bought Navteq for $8.1 billion, which made and installed road sensors, allowing maps developed by Nokia to map traffic and assess faster routes. Navteq sensors were already installed in Europe, covering 400,000 kilometers of road, 35 major cities, and 13 countries. In other words, a great innovation for the market, and Nokia was convinced that real-time traffic monitoring using Navteq sensors was critical to its new business model success.

Another group of people with a broad vision of the ecosystem and considering the technology available created Waze (almost at the same time as the transaction made between NOKIA and Navteq), which with the use of GPS technology of the recently launched smartphones, allowed the creation of anew entirely different business model, using crowd sourcing to get the information about the location for free. In 2013 Waze already had 50 million sensors around the world

 ​We need to understand how to act intelligently and have humans thinking more broadly about how technology can be used to solve challenges.

Another case that I highlightit´saboutBlackberry. Theybecameaheadof their competitors because of their strong focus on innovation. They were the spark that started the smartphone revolution, a new technology, and unfortunately, some Blackberry people decided not to move forward and didn't rethink their business model.

In these cases and in many others that we know of, each of the companies applied, one way or another, the technology that was available at the time; the difference was not the technology but the business model conceived by a group of people in how to solve the challenge proposed without boundaries and openly and innovatively.

Digital Transformation is not just about technology. This transformation must address how corporate culture influences the company's business model and how its challenges are used to take the company to the next level.