No, that’s not a typo – we’re getting Phygital!
Phygital transformation is combining the best of digital and physical worlds to create the ideal integrated experiences across all sectors of life. In fact, you may have already taken part in phygitization! Self-driving cars are making their way into the mainstream across global markets. Virtual reality headsets are helping to detect Alzheimer’s disease. And attention Walmart shoppers: your purchases were likely shipped from a warehouse that uses autonomous drones and electronic tags.
Successful Phygital Transformation in Action
It’s clear that organizations today are facing new challenges such as labor shortages, pandemics, supply chain issues and other societal demands. While digital transformation has helped, it falls short. An emerging solution – phygital transformation – is less about IT and more about HOW the digital of AI and robotics is merging with the physical world to enable and disrupt all aspects of society. This is where phygital makes a difference.
This exciting new concept of phygital transformation has already led to a new caliber of organizational change leadership that is both bold and thoughtful. Remember when the widespread data breach happened at Target in 2013? If you were impacted, it’s probably hard to forget. Target suffered a 40% drop in sales, but with their CEO taking bold moves their sales have not only recovered, they’re skyrocketing!
How did they do the seemingly impossible? To quickly summarize a near decade-long phygital journey, Target (1) improved their Product offering, (2) invested in People development, (3) digitized and expanded its Process, (4) reengineered its digital Platform, (5) defined a clear Purpose to make shopping easy and fun for their guestss, and (6) Phygitized user experiences with a “See It Your Space” feature to allow customers to visualize how furniture would look in their homes, as well as phygitized their warehouse operations, similarly to Walmart.
Embarking on Your Organization’s Phygital Journey: The 6P Framework
Notice a trend? The first step to your organization’s phygital transformation is to use our proprietary 6P framework to assess your organization’s “phygital maturity.” As you probably already figured out, the 6Ps stand for:
- Product: the iterative development and agile mindset underpinning new products and services with a clear focus on customer needs;
- People: everything related to skillset, talent, and adoption of behaviors and ways of working (WOW);
- Process: your organization’s workflow across its operation and business functions;
- Platform: the technical stuff like data, AI, sensors, actuators, robots, and integration of software and hardware;
- Purpose: your organization’s unique and positive impact on society, and;
- Phygital: the integration of human-machine experiences.
You can think of the 6Ps as the ingredients of a change management framework that makes phygital transformation possible. Has your organization focused on or missed any of these steps? Are you ready to be bold and lead your team down a path towards exponential success? Yes? Then it’s time to get phygital!
Contact us now to learn more about the 6P Framework, including a survey tool that can help your organization to get started today.
This blog accompanies a presentation — “The Future is Phygital” — given by Nicole M. Sroka and Dr. James G. Shanahan at ACMP’s CHG MGMT: Global Connect 2022 event on June 29, 2022. This post will is the second in a series to help you navigate the new Phygital frontier.
James is the CEO, Cofounder of Church and Duncan Group Inc, and Nicole is the Founder and Lead Consultant of Mind Moves LLC. Together, they make up both the technical and people side of change needed for digital transformation towards an Artificial Intelligence future of work.
