“Digital transformation”

Ed Toner, Nebraska CIO

I think a lot of people assume that “digital transformation” is taking things from paper and digitizing it, making it so that you could automate the input. Really, digital transformation is providing the business outcome and the processes — and that’s the most important part, the processes — that are aligned with the right technology. When I’m talking to my business partners and the agencies, I say to them, “What problem are we trying to solve? What’s the business outcome we want?” Too many times we go out and find forms that are digitized, but it asks 25% more questions than we even use. They’ve taken a manual process and instead of improving it, they just recreate it and say “that’s digital transformation.”