Lipi Sarkar - Building a Digital Future

It is a significant decision for an organization to invest and embark on a digital transformation journey with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform and realize the benefit over a period. Every journey has its own unique experience to learn from and hence we have reached out to a few people to contribute to this book. We want to thank them all for sharing their expertise and input, which has helped us to shape the book with their interesting experiences.

Maria Kartousova

Technology Consultant and Serial Intrapreneur. Maria specializes in consulting and driving digital transformation while translating complex ideas into practical strategies and generating solutions for complex issues. She has vast experience driving organizations toward their growth and digital maturity and in her career has worked with various organizations in the United Kingdom and Greece.

Sabine Margolis

Experienced collaborator and innovative thinker with 20 plus years in diverse business-to-information technology environments. Sabine is proficient in developing, communicating, and implementing technology roadmaps to meet business strategy needs with strong visual, verbal, and written communication skills across ERP ecosystems, business intelligence, and analytics.

Ritesh Jain

Cofounder at Infynit—Humanizing Credit and Credit Cards. Ritesh is a former COO Digital at HSBC. He is an entrepreneurial technology leader and board advisor with global experience across various sectors including payments and banking, and led digital transformation at global organizations like HSBC, VISA, and Maersk. He led the future of payments at VISA, introduced Apple Pay, and built a wealth management company as a founder CTO. Presently, he is a member of a G20 Initiative for financial inclusion.

Simon Shaw

Business-focused IT and ERP Consultant. Simon has held positions as diverse as a sales and marketing manager for an international imports company and the ERP design authority for a defense organization. He holds qualifications in business management as well as computing and has managed infrastructure and applications IT teams. His main focus is improving the benefits companies get from their digital transformations.

Manali Tiwari

An ardent technical writer, editor, and proofreader, holding credible professional experience in the industry of book editing services. Manali graduated as an engineer with a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology. After gaining three years of experience as a QA professional in the corporate world, she decided to leave her job to pursue technical writing and hone her knowledge of technology.

Pablo Villa

Business Solutions Architect. Pablo works helping companies in their digital transformation journey. He has worked with enterprise customers from different industries, implementing solutions based on Dynamics 365 and Power Platform for the last 14 years. He is highly focused on business objectives, value proposition, quality, strategy, and technology to help customers to sell more, reduce costs, improve efficiency, collect and analyze data, and improve processes.

Part I explores the organization's need for a digital transformation business case and identifies key drivers of change and why Dynamics 365 is the right solution to transform the business. Real-life customer stories from organizations on their business challenges, solution, and the benefits they have achieved are also provided.

Chapter 1:This chapter defines digital transformations and sets the scene by identifying the key drivers of change for an organization, talks about all phases of digital transformation—the ways to assess the readiness of an organization and create a digital business strategy including emerging business priorities.

Chapter 2:To drive business efficiencies of an organization, a platform like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform can accelerate digital transformation and manage change effectively with the right measures. The key is to simplify, standardize, and automate the business process that aims to deliver an outcome and realize early benefits.

Chapter 3:This chapter discusses the capabilities of the Microsoft Power Platform that empowers employees to resolve many complex business scenarios with low-code/no-code solutions, creating a data-driven culture with Power BI, which improves customer experience with chatbots, and all of these factors add up for business to make informed decisions.

The advance on technology is based on making it fit in so that you don't really even notice it, so it's part of everyday life.

—Bill Gates, Cofounder at Microsoft

It was a gorgeous sunny day in March 2020. Jack sounded a bit worried in the morning call I had with him. He had a planned series of client workshops to run through requirements for a transformation program that is aiming to automate and centralize sales engagement globally across 15 countries. The overarching outcome of these workshop sessions was to define and design a program that will result in increasing sales, eliminating dependencies on individually maintained Excel and manual notes.

The mode of delivery for these workshops engaging all key client stakeholders from different countries had to be changed suddenly from face-to-face to virtual session. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, 2020 has driven transformation rapidly up the Board and Executive priority list. Many organizations had started this digital journey but global and national lockdowns and corporate offices moving to a work-from-home mandate have forced businesses to rethink enterprise and customer processes, optimization, and efficiency.

Even a few weeks back, such an important workshop day would normally involve morning travel by taxi and train, arriving at the venue ensuring the logistics were in place before the workshop starts.

Anyway, the meeting started with Jack sharing the objective of the workshop and he addressed the current challenge of a virtual workshop session and the key rules of communications during the session (including timing of breaks, waiting for turns using the icon hands-up, and managing expectation of possible background noise of pets or children). Interestingly, the session went very well with everyone accepting the current challenging situation, focussed on the bigger picture and how to best utilize the time remotely.

After 6 months of working from home during COVID-19, we have accepted the new normal and understand that our calls might have background noise of pets or kids. Life moves on with continuous change and innovation.

In every decade, we witness a big transformation and a shift in our lifestyle and in our businesses, which are enabled by technology that was unthinkable earlier. What is “unthinkable” today is a new normal tomorrow.

“We must dare to think ‘unthinkable’ thoughts.”

— J.W. Fulbright

Our book takes the reader step-by-step through digital transformation, key drivers for change, digital maturity of the organization, and how Dynamics 365 can enable digital transformation in the organization.

The Covid-19 global pandemic has highlighted gaps in the so-called digitally transformed businesses and their operating models. Now it is the obligation of businesses to reflect on their enterprise-wide approach to digital transformation. There will be several new definitions coming through for digital transformation after 2020, and these will have different approaches. The goal of this book is to create a deeper understanding of the concept of digital transformation, and the critical elements for consideration, applying them to Microsoft Dynamics 365.