Hi, I'm Anna, Global Lead for Business and Services Training at Google Cloud. We've spoken about the superpowers of Cloud technology and how experiencing transformation across your organization also involves a cultural and business change. You've explored the innovation mindset and practical ways to apply it in your role, with your team, and in your business. Now is the time to explore how you can leverage Cloud technology in your business to solve high impact business challenges. In this module, I'll unpack how you can craft the ideal business challenge to unlock the value from your data. I'll do this by first distinguishing between improvements and transformations. Then, I'll show you how to refine the scope of your business challenge with the right format, key principles, and tips. Next, we'll explore how to tie insights from a data ecosystem to business challenges. Finally, I'll use a special framework to help you assess the likely outcome of your strongest business challenges. Will they lead to improvements, or transformations, or somewhere in between? Let's find out. Embracing the cloud paradigm and scaling the garage mindset means it's time to re-evaluate how you think about future projects. Let's explore how you can practically embrace and scale this mindset to meet broad business challenges. To start, let's define two terms; improvement and transformation. Improvements involve increasing the capability of existing technologies, systems, and products. Or, they involve finding a way to scale a refinement to an existing solution. This means, your teams would only be focusing on incremental advances to develop and enhance a model as it exists now. For example, suppose your business challenge is, "How can I set up two more office spaces for employees while paying the same utility bill as before?" Fortunately, you recently discovered low energy light bulbs. So you commission your building maintenance crew to replace all regular light bulbs with low-energy ones to reduce your electric bill. This would be a scaled improvement. The solution to the problem exists and implementing it at scale doesn't significantly affect your business practices. Transformation on the other hand is a fundamental change in the way you think about projects and the way things are done. It's about innovating in a domain and finding fundamentally new, better, and different ways of operating. Transformation revolutionizes organizational practice, corporate culture, and business models in order to leverage new solutions. If we return to the previous example about solving for lighting solutions and frame the challenge from a transformation perspective, you might ask yourself, "How can I provide a personalized lighting system that adapts to the needs, emotions, and ambient conditions of each employee globally to improve employee well-being?" You might combine the superpowers of the Cloud such as perception and prediction with custom machine-learning models and light therapy to improve employee working conditions and well-being. Such an outcome would be completely new and the technology would have to be created from scratch. This is an example of a transformation. To help you achieve transformation and the way you think and the way you work, and at scale, we shared three simple rules earlier that guide Google's business practice. These rules work towards your mission, your why. I invite you to incorporate these in your day to day practice. Once again, these rules are focus on the user. If it makes sense for your user, it will make sense for your business. In other words, focus on the user and everything else will follow. Think 10X, not 10 percent. Aim for something that is 10 times better than what you currently offer. Take an entirely new look at your problem. Having this 10X mentality means the you'll always be aiming for something that is exponentially better than what you do now, not simply a small percentage improvement. Launch and iterate. You do not have to be perfect on paper. Launch and iterate says try and try again. The more ideas you explore and the more you learn, the faster you'll achieve success. Now, I know you might not be in a position to lead an organization-wide transformation yet. Regardless of your current role, you can adapt the steps in the upcoming lessons and apply them to your situation. Even if you're leading smaller scale projects, they are more likely to succeed if you focus on the user, aim higher, and keep that open innovative mindset. Remember, improvements can help pave the way to transformation.
