I was honoured to be a judge at last week’s Digital Experience Awards in the Digital Transformation - Team category. Along with four other esteemed colleagues, I was tasked with examining submissions from a range of different organisations who had embarked on their own digital journeys.

From a personal perspective, it was fascinating to see how companies were going so much further than simply paying lip service to digital processes or hiring in an external agency to help them with their digital marketing.

Instead, we saw submissions from companies who were witnessing a dramatic change in how they functioned as organisations. Which is totally in line with how the DNAsix digital business works.

We heard from the team at Share Centre, an online stockbroker. Not only did they want to overhaul their online offering but were keen to reach out to new (mostly younger), Millennial audiences. This was achieved not only through an app and redesigned website but by restructuring the business, bringing together people from the marketing, customer experience and digital teams.

Meanwhile, over at Three UK, there was an even greater emphasis on changing the culture of the organisation. We heard how their aim was to be a digital-first business and this was achieved through a variety of methods including sending their leadership team to CASS and Cranfield Business Schools, removing barriers to women in technology, investing in wellness plus changing the way they recruited and retained staff. All this was done in conjunction with constantly developing their digital systems to meet the needs of customers.

Another telecoms company shortlisted was EE who set out to redefine digital within their organisation by bringing together three parts of the business - Digital, CRM and Insight - into one, agile team. Whilst this has been successful, it is only the start and there is now a desire to completely re-organise the whole business using this new team as uber ‘digital ambassadors’. As with the Share Centre and Three UK, the C-suite and management teams were key to achieving this successful change management.

Overall winner in this category was Micheldever Tyre Services who looked at creating a new digital ecosystem within the business. Along with a strategic digital vision, the company’s Protyre Team worked in conjunction with suppliers Profound and Koozai to achieve a radical change in both the customer experience and the level of customer engagement with their website and app. As with the other shortlisted companies, key to this success was stakeholder management as well as buy-in from the leadership team of the organisation.

For many years now, I’ve been talking about how important strategy AND culture are in creating truly digitally adaptive organisations. So it was really satisfying to hear from companies who were actually doing this on a grand scale to achieve both short and long term gains.

I’m now very much looking forward to the 2019 awards!