In my experience, there are two serious mistakes that many business leaders make when they start thinking about digital transformation. Firstly, believing that it's a process that an organization begins, then goes through, and then comes out of the other side in a "digitally transformed" state. The second is that it's all about technology. In reality, digital transformation is an ongoing process that never truly ends. Businesses were just getting acclimatized to computers being an essential everyday tool since the 80s when the internet emerged in the nineties and forced them to rethink technology from the ground up.

The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. Deloitte Consulting published a report today that suggests a golden age of AI is in the offing, assuming organizations can implement and maintain a consistent approach to machine learning operations (MLOps). Citing market research conducted by AI-focused Cognilytica, the MLOps: Industrialized AI report from Deloitte notes that the market for MLOps platforms is forecast to generate annual revenues in excess of $4 billion by 2025. Several startups are already focused on providing these platforms. Less clear, however, is the degree to which MLOps might become an extension of the DevOps platforms many organizations rely on today to build and deploy software.

For Wärtsilä, a Finnish headquartered firm that employs around 18,000 workers and which manufactures and services power sources and other equipment in the marine and energy markets, digital business transformation is a very practical thing. In fact, back in December 2016, Marco claimed that Wärtsilä was "embarking on one of the boldest, innovative and most exciting digital transformation programmes in the industrial, marine and energy sectors." The company is not the most famous of firms, unless you work in the marine or renewable energy business, you may have never heard of it, but in fact, roughly one in two marine vessels in the world are either serviced, powered, navigated or propelled by Wartsila's technology. But what about today, how is the digital business transformation programme performing? "One of the things we've now decided to do is create a sort of digital boot camp, a digital academy, with a leadership programme on what it means to lead in a digitally-enabled business. Marco Ryan, a veteran in digital business transformation, likens this process to a digital onion, and compares the old way of doing things to the Parthenon. "At Wärtsilä, we had over 300 ideas submitted by colleagues in the last 18 months, of which about 50 or 60 have actually come into our incubation centres.

When building and expanding a digital business, CIOs will benefit from being more specific about the ambition of the digital business strategy. Is the goal to transform the business model or to optimize the existing one? Digital transformation and digital business optimization what do these terms mean to your enterprise? Many CIOs and digital business leaders are at a stage where they need to get more specific about how far their enterprise will pursue digital business. Said another way, what is the digital ambition of the enterprise?

Manulife Financial Corp. said Thursday it will cut about 700 jobs as it becomes the latest financial services company to streamline and digitize customer service operations. The cuts will largely target customer service positions that are no longer necessary as the company automates customer transactions, said Manulife Canada CEO Michael Doughty. "Our industry, including us, are still doing too many things the old way: processing paperwork, accepting mail, answering telephone calls on information requests that clients should be able to access on their own." "This is a pretty bold step in transforming ourselves to become a digital, customer-centric organization," said Doughty. The job cuts will come through voluntary exit programs and natural attrition over the next 18 months, the financial services company said.

Ask 10 CIOs how they define digital transformation and you're likely to get 10 different answers with one common theme: a laundry list of technology projects intended to foster sweeping business changes. Even so, digital transformation isn't so easily defined. Surely, digital transformation involves a radical rethinking of how an organization uses technology in pursuit of new revenue streams or new business models. And it also requires cross-departmental collaboration in pairing business-focused philosophies with rapid application development models. But for many organizations, digital transformation is really digital optimization in disguise, as new digital initiatives merely augment existing services.

The finance department isn't always regarded as being at the forefront of digital business transformation. But as artificial intelligence (AI) technologies continue to mature, one of the biggest drivers of AI adoption when it comes to accounting will be the fiduciary responsibilities of the chief financial officer (CFO). Accountants spend a lot of time laboriously matching invoices with other various statements of work to determine whether a payment should be made in, for example, 30, 60 or 90 days. Given the fact that these activities are largely an exercise in pattern recognition, it's only a matter of time before tasks such as these are more efficiently accomplished by machine learning algorithms capable of visually inspecting documents and determining what actions need to be taken based on rules defined by the CFO. In fact, SAP is already predicting that the days when organizations hire large numbers of accountants just to process documents are near an end.