The individual research project is work on a company or organization or startup of your choice. You are advised to choose an organization that you either have inside knowledge of, or if that is impossible, that you know well as a customer: in that case, you will research the company as a customer, and try and get some inside information on their readiness for DT, either by desk research or by interviewing stakeholders of the company.
You are hired as a consultant to improve their customer experience. You should imagine a way to upgrade the digital support for the operations of the company, in one of these ways:
1. Pleasing the customer better with a better/new service or product,
2. Enhancing the operational efficiency of the organization.
3. Enable the company to function during a lockdown, or extensive work-at-home period.
It can be difficult to get the internal operations of a company you are only customer of. In that case, focus on part A. Benchmark against the experiences you have faced at other organizations,
Deliverables: a +/-2000 words report (with academic references) aimed at convincing the company’s managers to implement your plan, stating:
1. Cover page including title, intake and all your passport names, student number.
2. Executive Summary: a summary in half a page of the idea and the resources needed
3. Your relationship with the organization (typically: insider, employee)
4. Your research process: what data collection process have you used, and how did you analyze that data?
5. Brief and Background about the organization
6. DT problems they or customers face.
7. Assessment of Readiness for the Digital Transformation. (You compare at least two frameworks of the one discussed in class (The model included already in the content, Westerman & Al.) and/or the frameworks of the mini cases in the course)
8. Your design thinking process to come up with new ideas for improving either internal processes, customer experience, efficiency or maybe think up extensions to business models, new streams of revenue.
9. The vision: the new idea along the lines of A), B) or C) above
10. What the company would need, in order to implement h)
11. Digital Capabilities
12. Leadership capabilities
13. Assets that remain assets vs assets that will become dead-weights
14. Challenges that they may face during the implementation
15. Recommended steps for implementation. 16. Relevant (data, analysis, methodology) references in APA style!
