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Preface

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, ‘what are you doing for others?’

—Martin Luther King Jr.

The sun has enough energy to continue for another 5 billion years. After that, it will swell to a red giant. We know these facts, when we refer to 5 billion years it seems limitless, but it is not. Everything we feel we have in abundance today may not last forever. Energy resources are either renewable or non-renewable. Mankind was always concerned about the future of humanity and there are various threats to life on the planet, such as global warming, nuclear war, and now the COVID-19 pandemic.

From the days of gazing into the sky, learning about our universe and life-form on Earth, we always wondered how we could contribute to mankind such that someone somewhere would benefit from that contribution, irrespective of how insignificant it may seem. With that desire and dream in mind, we as authors of Building a Digital Future felt it is timely to share our digital transformation experiences, combining them with the experiences from various industry experts and senior business stakeholders. We have lived many end-to-end digital transformation journeys across various sectors and have been involved in pre-sales, RFP, and sales processes.

Digital Transformation is not a buzzword and it is not just about technology. When digital transformation is planned carefully considering all factors, it delivers quick-win, competitive advantage to a business. It also helps acceptance across stakeholders, makes collaboration effective and efficient, and the pace of transformation can be accelerated by leveraging the right governance framework and the right technology.

Building a Digital Future provides frameworks and models across all chapters, offers guidance, and leads you to think in the right strategic direction. The frameworks, approaches, and models are applicable for all sectors and flexible to expand for your own organization, enabling you to make your own choice.

During these unprecedented times when businesses are not performing as forecasted a year back, this book helps the reader to identify the key measures that a business needs to consider. Leading a digital transformation by having the right technology of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform can make transformation fast-paced, cost-effective, and efficient, with inbuilt industry-led processes and hence takes a lot of challenges out of the way. This book also addresses various roles and responsibilities that are deemed necessary for a digital transformation. While a number of jobs have been furloughed in this phase of the pandemic, the book cites examples of how the Microsoft Dynamics platform helps in empowering employees by providing a choice of self-learning low-code platform, diverting their skillsets, and delivering value to business. The book includes key capabilities of Dynamics 365 on a high level, notes design choices that one needs to consider, makes the reader aware of the Dynamics Roadmap, and releases reference links and Dynamics community and user group links. While this book is not written with the intention to master Dynamics 365 as a product, it is designed to help the reader understand the capabilities that Dynamics 365 can unlock.

The global digital transformation needs to address challenges globally and locally, but some challenges are unforeseen. From our own experience of global digital transformation, the risks specific to organizations, team culture, planning, and change management are highlighted to prepare the readers for any unknown challenges.

Who Will Find This Book Useful and Why?

A primary target for this book is the business executive population, namely C-suite stakeholders, senior management, program directors or managers, implementation consultants, and business managers. In other words, whoever is considering digital transformation to improve and increase efficiencies, optimization, sales revenue across the business of finance and operation, supply chain, retail and customer relationship management—sales, marketing, or services. The book recommends framework, a capability model across the business, powerful tools to automate time-consuming tasks, and approaches to drive innovation and improvements through an evergreen system post implementation. The concepts of digital transformation are laid out and take you through a step-by-step transformation journey, highlighting many of the pitfalls that you may need to be aware of. This book covers digital transformation with the powerful technology platform Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.

The aspiration, though, is to reach much further than the current population of business executives. This book is meant to be useful and relevant for business school or management students who are thinking to start their career paths in digital transformation and are not certain where to start from or do not have any preference of the technology roadmap. It is hoped that this book will help to build an understanding about the concept of digital transformation, planning, and change to consider from an organization perspective, working with an implementation partner, the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365, and, finally, driving the innovation and continuous improvements through a workable support model and ongoing improvement framework.

Scope and Structure of the Book

The book is organized into three parts.

Part I, Digital Transformation with Microsoft Dynamics 365, explores the business case for change, identifying capabilities of the organization and why Dynamics 365 is the right solution to transform your business and how Power Platform can empower your employees and deliver business efficiencies.

Part II, Blueprint for Executing a Successful Dynamics 365 Project, expands on the three core areas of leading a successful transformation program with readiness and a planning roadmap, including change management depending on the maturity of the organization and the fundamentals of governance principles that need to be established from the beginning.

Part III, Driving Innovation and Continuous Improvements with Dynamic 365, sets a clear roadmap by engaging the stakeholders at the right time, clarifying various roles and responsibilities of teams across the program, defining the support model and process that is deemed necessary post go-live, and finally how to keep the continuous improvements evolving by measuring user adoption and letting the product and services be evergreen without any shelf life.

Appendices include high-level information of a few tools and key information about Lifecycle Services and Azure DevOps that are key enablers to make your Dynamics 365 program a success. It also includes a section on Microsoft FastTrack for Dynamics 365 and how you can accelerate your implementation program.

Each chapter includes quotes from industry leaders and experts across the globe, including the world's most admired companies with their experiences making the read more interesting and relatable. Each section includes real-life customer stories across various sectors from different countries discussing business challenges, experience of the implementation and key decisions taken, and finally with an outcome on the benefits it has delivered.

Figure 1 is a high-level overview of each part and their respective chapters. It is also presented as an indicative timeline of leading an end-to-end digital transformation program. You can read this book in a linear fashion by reading one chapter after another and you may also deep-dive into one section that you may need in order to understand the concept in more detail if you are already familiar with one section.

We would like to stay engaged with our readers and you can reach out to us for sharing your customer story or if you need to discuss any area of the book in more detail. Here is the book website link: http://buildingadigitalfuture.com/.

FIGURE 1 Digital Transformation Timeline