Digital transformation is more than a buzzword; it’s a corporate strategy for reinventing every part of an organization from bottom to top. The ultimate goal of any digital transformation should not be any particular state, but the ability to take advantage of the latest digital technology to create a machine that can rapidly respond to changing business and market conditions, is always competitive and exceeds demanding customer expectations.

Achieving the full potential of digital transformation relies heavily on an enterprise’s ability to turn all the documents it has amassed into insights and actionable intelligence.

IntroductionIt’s difficult to read a business article, book, blog or report without coming across the term “digital transformation” (DX). That’s understandable, as organizations look for leading-edge technologies to help them compete in this new-age digital economy. At the heart of digital transformation is the ability to continually derive actionable intelligence from documents across the enterprise, as well as the implementation of process-driven workflows to process document influx and automated approaches to conduct business with customers.

Digital transformation is a goal for any corporate executive charged with helping the enterprise improve its competitive position, financial performance, customer satisfaction or any other key performance indicator. “By the end of 2017, 67% of Global 2000 CEOs will have digital transformation at the center of their corporate strategy,” according to IDC.1

1 “Digital Transformation Will Shape 2016,” IDC, November 2015

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Successful Digital Transformation Is Built Upon Actionable Intelligence

The business potential for DX is nothing short of inspirational—but only if organizations take a wide-ranging, holistic view based on new, deep and transformative insights gleaned from the tsunami of data being created every minute of every day. Northeastern University estimates that 2.5 exabytes of data is produced every day—the equivalent of 250,000 Libraries of Congress.2

The challenge for organizations is how to turn this flood of data into useful information that empowers their digital transformation—where innovation, creativity and actionable intelligence go hand in hand to improve business results.

This paper looks at how organizations can make DX a reality by understanding how to turn that sea of data contained in countless documents into actionable intelligence.

The promise and potential of digital transformationDX is at or near the top of the list for most C-level executives’ strategic initiatives, and executive buy-in is essential for any successful DX endeavor. “Digital transformation requires strong leadership to drive change,” noted consulting firm CAP Gemini in an article in Sloan Management Review.3 Whether the goal is increased customer understanding, revenue growth, improving business process efficiency or empowering workers, the most sophisticated DX users must combine digital activity with strong leadership to turn technology into transformation.4

Accenture also highlighted the need for an increasingly diverse executive approval on DX efforts: “52% of chief financial officers are providing major input into the digital transformation process—second only to the CIO.”5

Why is DX such a big deal for C-suite executives and boards of directors? There are several reasons:

• Enterprises run 24/7, globally and at a much faster pace than ever before, and manual processes no longer suffice.

• The huge growth of all types of data has made it more difficult to mine for true insights without the use of sophisticated technical tools.

• Enterprises continue to stress about perceived imbalances in what they spent on technology and what they feel they are actually achieving as a result. One study noted that only 3% of CFOs said their companies were doing an excellent job in converting technology investments to business value.6

To attain a greater ROI on digital transformation, organizations must put more emphasis on tools and processes that actually generate actionable intelligence—data-driven insights used for informed decision making and better business outcomes.

2 “How Much Data is Produced Every Day?” Northeastern University, May 20163 “The 9 Elements of Digital Transformation,” Sloan Management Review, 20144 Ibid5 “Digital Transformation Enables Expansion of Shared-Services Model,” eWeek, December 20146 AlixPartners CFO Research study, 2015

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There is an important tenet that business and IT leaders must keep in mind when planning and deploying DX solutions: the broad and modern use of the term “document.”

Documents are everywhere. Images, fax scans, emails, PDFs, voice-to-text, spreadsheets, presentations and the plethora of ways organizations exchange and process information. Organizations use documents to run their business by extracting the most important nuggets to feed data-centric workflows and build knowledge bases.

For years, the buzzword that has ruled the business press has been “big data,” but as organizations struggle with how to use and extract value from big data in their day-to-day operations, it may be time to shift the rhetoric to “big documents,” which truly enable enterprises to gather and mine actionable intelligence from the vast amounts of information stored in multiple heterogeneous systems across any enterprise.

The challenges in achieving actionable intelligenceMoore’s Law originally postulated that computing power doubled every 18 months. By comparison, unstructured data contained in documents has been estimated to double every 12 months, much faster than Moore’s Law. In fact, exponentially faster—2x/36 where x is in months.

Simply put, unstructured data is any data that is not organized in a predefined manner or has a predefined data model. Managing all of that unstructured data and effectively putting it to use can be a nightmare. If you don’t have the right set of technologies to help, your data could end up in a bin—Gartner recently claimed 50% of a company’s data has indeterminate value and that another 30% was redundant, outdated or trivial. That only leaves 20% that is being effectively used.

Another challenge is the necessity for executives to make DX part of their organization’s strategic vision. This is an essential first step to ensure that others in the organization understand and embrace DX as a priority, and that they appreciate the commitment the organization intends to make to turn vision into a reality.

As part of the priority, organizations need to embrace the idea of leveraging the latest technologies that can radically streamline their outdated, complicated or manual processes. While technology itself is not a panacea, organizations need to take advantage of new systems that generate and expose actionable intelligence. Data warehouses, business intelligence software and other analytics platforms are important, but these often fail to provide the full array of integrated functionality necessary to turn documents into insights.

What your organization should do nowCreating actionable intelligence has a lot of moving parts and may seem daunting, especially to organizations that lack the executive buy-in or internal resources.

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Here are a few things any organization should do at the beginning of its journey to DX and actionable intelligence:

• Broaden your definition of “document” to include images and combinations of images and text. While there are many potential insights that can be unlocked in traditional text-only documents, these are dwarfed when you expand the meaning of documents to include data-rich formats circulating in the Internet of Things.

• Become “search ready” by deploying tools and processes that make it easier to index, create metadata and find insights previously locked deep in file shares scattered across the enterprise.

• Invest in the right technologies. While every IT organization has its favored analytics platforms, look for solutions that support the full expanse of functionality that can generate the insights necessary to take decisive and meaningful action.

• Think about holistic end-to-end solutions, not point products. Many organizations make the mistake of looking at DX as a point solution for specific problems; e.g., it’s a data extraction problem, let’s get a good data extraction tool. But true value from DX—the kind that yields actionable intelligence—comes from processing disparate information sources, leveraging a full spectrum of business processes and storing information that is easily accessible and searchable.

Working with a proven partner Actionable intelligence doesn’t just happen organically. It requires a combination of sophisticated solutions, business process acumen and real-world experience. Delivering that combination of capabilities is best achieved by collaborating with a competent technology partner like AI Foundry, an up-and-comer that is a business unit of venerable Kodak Alaris.

AI Foundry provides a new generation of machine-learning software that significantly increases the automation within enterprises by integrating information, people and processes. AI Foundry helps organizations transform documents and “dark data” into actionable intelligence to fuel your digital transformation.

The company’s DX solutions are built on a robust platform of capabilities. Its functionality is delivered as an integrated, holistic solution that aligns with the realities of how organizations work, rather than as a disparate set of point products for narrow niches.

The AI Foundry platform encompasses six core functions relating to the creation of actionable intelligence out of the vast sea of documents built on unstructured and dark data:

• Advanced Document Capture

• Document Classification

• Data Extraction

• Workflow/Business Process Management

• Enterprise Content Management

• Intelligent Search

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Taken together, these six pillars of actionable intelligence help customers find a needle in a haystack—key business intelligence inside an ocean of data.

ConclusionDigital transformation is a journey, and you can’t travel it optimally or successfully without actionable intelligence. Business and IT decision makers should be mindful that the goal is not to solve point problems; it’s to improve business outcomes by putting the right data into the right hands at the right time.

Doing that requires a modern view of documents and the valuable information held captive; these documents are the fuel for identifying and acting on key insights—“actionable intelligence.”

Get started—today. Digital transformation is a journey, not a project. Having a strategic vision is essential, but the best way to turn that vision into a reality is to not overthink the strategy; otherwise there may be a bias for getting started.

Experienced partners like AI Foundry can help you get going and leverage the full potential of digital transformation.

For more information on how to prepare your organization for digital transformation that yields actionable intelligence, please visit www.aifoundry.com.

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AI Foundry provides a new generation of machine-learning software that significantly increases the automation within enterprises by integrating information, people, and processes. We help transform unstructured and dark data into actionable intelligence to fuel your digital transformation. For more information please visit AIFoundry.com.© 2016 AI Foundry, a Kodak Alaris Business