answer, our digital transformation strategy must consider it, alone. Similar to how an audience-focused approach to building a website must reject the inevitable encroachment legacy concerns, a digital transformation strategy should be free from attempts to tether it to existing business processes and needs.
How Do We Proceed with Transformation?
David Rogers, author of The Digital Transformation Playbook , describes five domains of digital transformation for consideration: customers, competition, data, innovation, and value. Each of these can be cross-walked to the interests of Cooperative Extension programs. Customers , or audiences in our case, must evolve beyond passive receivers of content. Rather than moving information in one direction, from creators to consumers, customers must be elevated to partners in building a network of information sharing. This requires bidirectional communication channels and audience-focused, value-driven program development. It should be noted that this evolution has already taken place in many programs in Cooperative Extension. Competitors to Cooperative Extension could be thought of as content creators on YouTube, other Extension programs, other university outreach initiatives, Wikipedia, commercial periodicals, and even each other, if our content overlaps but has no integration. How many of these competitors could easily shift to collaborators in our mission, either in developing our programs or our networks? (More on this later!) Data collection and management should be a part of how we define each goal, but how we turn that data into decision-making currency is another matter. An obvious need for most organizations is a custome r relationship management system (CRM). “Imagine all the insights we will gain” is a common yet general claim for why a CRM should be implemented or upgraded. This attitude, however useful in inspiring others, does not define the value of those insights, nor does it directly relate to the core question from earlier. Our transformation strategy requires that we intimately understand how those insights will drive our goals before investing in an expensive technology implementation. Instead, we might state that a CRM platform with support for volunteer programs would provide analytical tools that tell us, in real-time, the key questions
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