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Digital Transformation Workshop

Exploring Digital Disruption, Strategy & Implementation

What This Workshop Is About

Digital technologies are fundamentally reshaping industries, business models, and the nature of work itself. This workshop explores how organisations can understand, respond to, and lead digital transformation — drawing on your own experience as practitioners working at the frontier of that change.

Working in groups, you'll apply frameworks from the taught session to a specific industry domain, moving from analysis to strategic insight to actionable recommendation.

Your challenge: Analyse how a specific digital technology is transforming an industry, develop a strategic framework for assessing impact, and identify the structural barriers that must be overcome — with credible, concrete approaches to each.

How It Works

You'll work through three structured activities, each building on the last. Your group has been assigned a specific industry domain and digital technology combination. Draw on your professional experience — the most valuable input in the room is your direct knowledge of how these challenges play out in practice.

1

Disruption Mapping

Map the current state of your domain, the real (not just hyped) capabilities of your technology, and the forces most likely to determine the pace and direction of transformation.

2

Strategic Impact Canvas

Use the Desirability–Feasibility–Viability framework to build a clear strategic position: what should organisations do, can they do it, and where does the sustainable value lie?

3

Barriers & Roadmap

Identify the three structural barriers holding back transformation in your domain. For each, define a credible approach and a measurable indicator of progress.

After completing each activity, groups will share their findings with the class. The patterns that emerge across different domains and technologies are often where the most transferable insights live.

Group Assignments

  • Group 1: Healthcare & Life Sciences + AI / Machine Learning
  • Group 2: Financial Services + Generative AI & Intelligent Automation
  • Group 3: Manufacturing & Supply Chain + IoT, Robotics & Automation
  • Group 4: Retail & Consumer Experience + Personalisation & Generative AI
  • Group 5: Enterprise & Future of Work + AI Agents & Workflow Automation
  • Group 6: Public Services & Government + Cloud, AI & Digital Infrastructure

Each combination reflects a domain undergoing significant transformation. Bring your professional knowledge to bear — and look for patterns that transfer across sectors when you hear from other groups.

Getting the Most Out of This Workshop

Bring Your Experience

Your direct knowledge of how technology actually gets adopted (or doesn't) in organisations is the most valuable input. Use it.

Think Broadly, Then Focus

Start with wide-ranging discussion, then converge on your most important and defensible insights for each activity.

Be Specific

Name the companies, the technologies, the failures, and the constraints. Specificity is what separates sharp analysis from vague commentary.

Challenge the Hype

Every technology gets overclaimed before it gets understood. Your job is to separate genuine capability from marketing — and ground your analysis in evidence.

Connect the Dots

Link your analysis back to frameworks from the taught session. How do the concepts you've studied apply — and where do they need adapting to fit reality?

Listen During Share-Outs

The structural barriers and strategic patterns in your domain almost certainly appear in others. The cross-sector view is part of what you're here to build.

Using This Tool

  • Select your group on the home screen to see your assigned domain and technology
  • Work through each activity using the tabs at the top
  • Your work saves automatically as you type — no need to click "save"
  • Use "Present Mode" when sharing with the class for a clean, full-screen view
  • Export or print your work at the end to keep a record

Tip: Designate one person as the "scribe" to capture the group's ideas, but make sure everyone can see the screen and contribute to the discussion.

How This Tool Was Built

This workshop application was built in approximately 30 minutes through a conversation with Claude — a large language model — using only a text description of what was needed. No code was written by hand. The result is a fully functional, production-ready web application.

The human contributed vision, domain expertise, pedagogical design, and judgment about what mattered. The AI contributed rapid technical execution. Neither could have produced this alone, at this speed.

Models like Claude are available via API — including through cloud platforms — enabling this kind of human-AI collaboration at scale across an organisation.

Consider: what does it mean for your organisation, your customers, and your industry when a non-technical person can build something like this in half an hour?

Ready to Begin?

Select your group and start exploring digital transformation.

Start Workshop

Digital Transformation Workshop · Degree Apprenticeship Programme
Professor Alan Brown, University of Exeter Business School
www.alanbrown.net