• Address the processes and capabilities end-to-end. It is important to look at the entire customer journey to enable completion of the journey in a digital world.
• Address internal employee journeys as well, prioritized by cost of friction. Many companies forget internal processes and employee complexities and consequently end up with higher cost internally in addition to value loss.

Conduct purposeful innovation

It is not enough to simplify the products and processes. Real transformation continues to drive innovation. Launching an innovation workstream to drive focused, data-driven innovation is critical. Most organizations struggle to innovate and depend on incremental evolution. A purposeful innovation requires rethinking or instituting capabilities, including listening to customers, ethnographic studies, core-competency analysis and extensions, war-gaming to determine weaknesses and actions, and using data to constantly drive innovation. Innovation has to be a continuous and iterative workstream in the transformation effort, in order to enable the organization to reposition itself competitively for the new world.

Innovation must also address various aspects of the business as a whole, not just its products and services. Consequently, building the innovation workstream to address products and services, operations, customer experience and business model is critical. One of the key enablers of success here as well is building a cross-functional team to address this workstream, potentially led by the strategy function.