We aspire to be lean, agile, and capable of responding rapidly to changing marketplace demands. This is our approach on the journey to lean and agile outcome delivery that promotes closer collaboration between lines of business, development, and IT operations.

In just a few years, IT has completely invaded our everyday lives. Companies have had to find clever ways to adapt and have started to use new technologies to offer an ever-greater customer experience. Think of Uber, for example, these days it takes 20 seconds to order a cab, which will normally come in less than five minutes. A decade ago this was unimaginable.

At the same time, technology is radically changing the way customers interact with companies. First of all, customers are now in complete control – they decide what they want, where and when they want, how they want it delivered – and it is no longer up to organizations to “push” products and services out. It’s the customers that pull the product and service they need when they need it.

Secondly, customer expectations are higher and higher. The service a company provides must be simple, cost-effective, instantaneous, transparent, and perfectly tailored to their specific needs. And you cannot ignore these requirements, because if you do, they will use social media to voice their complaints.

“The main consequence of this momentous shift is that IT now has a new role: it is no longer a back-office support function, but a major channel of communication through which customers interact with your service.”

Organizations need to better integrate the IT function and the rest of their processes, to become more competitive in the digital world, and they need to learn how to do it quickly because new competitors are always on their way – hundreds of innovative digital startups are born every day.

Problem-solving is very effective when it comes to teaching people in our companies to “get creative” (or, rather, smart creative). If your business is to survive and thrive in the digital world you must create an environment in which people are constantly using their creativity to solve problems.

The main driver of a digital transformation is not an App, the use of the agile methodology or of big data, but the ability to listen to and solve each of the problems your users encounter.

This is a five-step process, which you can start to adopt today:

Do this every day and you will allow your company to confidently step into the digital world.