November, 20228 A truly great customer experience is what customers expect and is a critical ingredient for any business. At the heart of delivering on that expectation is digital capability. Customers today seek efficient, frictionless, always-on solutions in all aspects of their lives and improving digital capabilities through digital transformation is key to achieving that.Digital transformation is how we give our customers what they need. At Manulife, our ambition is to be the most digital, customer-centric global company in our industry. And that's where a strong approach to transformation is critical.Transformation tends to get over-used as an expression, it's much more than that. To transform a business takes a lot of planning and hard work. Simply telling someone, much less an entire organisation to change, achieves little. In fact, it may even to do the opposite and create resistance to change. The reality is that to really change, it needs to come from a desire to change­from top to bottom and side to side. Leveraging my career experience, I am the author of an approach to deliver digital transformation called the "Seven Ps". With proven success across multiple organisations, this approach is also proving successful for us at Manulife. This article will look at each of the Ps and the role they play in the transformation process.PurposePurpose provides clarity for your team. At Manulife, we have one mission: decisions made easier, lives made better. A clear and collective vision provides a sense of collaborative purpose about what the business is trying to achieve. Having an easy-to-understand purpose helps teams understand why they are doing what they do every day­why they are creating, experimenting, and delivering and how this ties back to the business purpose. It helps them understand the end-goal and where they fit in the process to achieving it. The key to success in driving purpose lies in the belief and commitment to the purpose from top executives in the organisation. It should underpin their strategic thinking and actions, as they lead by example, not being afraid to try something new, and not being afraid to pivot when a different course is the better course.PrinciplesWhen the purpose is clear, the next step is to define the organisation's delivery principles­what is our manifesto?This is about creating guidelines for delivery. It's not intended to be a rulebook, rather, it provides guardrails. The goal is never to stifle innovation. If you were to review the delivery across your organisation, could you define a list of principles that if followed, would lead to change and ultimately transformation?A guiding principle could be agility­creating a feedback loop by developing, testing and learning constantly. Perhaps your organisation wants the value exchange to be based on delivering world class quality driven by data, analytics and insights. Other guiding principles I've used include customer experience driven; minimise single point dependencies­both people and technology; long term vision, short term delivery with KPI measures; decouple our technology by creating modular, integrated solutions architecture. Similar to the constant articulation of purpose, the principles you define should underpin everything the organisation does, and the strategic and delivery decisions made. These principles must be agnostic of products, channels, departments, and technology solutions. Once you start to build up your foundation of principles, then bring it back to the purpose­the Why. By bringing it back to the Why, the purpose has clarity. That clarity will allow teams to be aligned and self-empowered, not needing constant approval from those above them. This is `SEVEN PS' TO HELP BUSINESSES DRIVE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONIN MY V EWBY CARMEN CASAGRANDA, CIO EMERGING MARKETS, MANULIFE ASIA
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