In the modern business environment, companies are continually embarking on digital transformation. Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers. It means changing your company’s culture to use data and technology to make more informed, faster decisions and better meet customer needs. A critical element of the process is to adopt a mentality of continual innovation and quality improvement. Here is what digital transformation is all about and how you can get started in your company.
What is Digital Transformation?
Because digital transformation will look a little different for every company, it can be hard to pinpoint a definition that applies to all. However, in general terms, digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of your company, resulting in fundamental changes to how your organization operates and how it delivers value to customers.
Beyond that, it’s a cultural change that requires your company to continually challenge the status quo, experiment often, and adopt new disruptive technologies. This sometimes means walking away from long-standing business processes that your company has been built upon in favor of relatively new practices that deliver value to your core vision. Digital transformation modernizes the way you approach technology, rethink processes, services, and products in terms of what is possible using the current technology.
Create a [Digital] Transformation Plan
Solutions to your pain points don’t necessarily have to involve comprehensive technology. But as part of a digital transformation, you should investigate how technology and big data can help in each area of the business. Create a clear digital transformation roadmap for acquiring and implementing the technological solution.
The plan should include key milestones for progress and steps your business will need to take to transform itself to maximize the benefits of the technology or data. Also, build in contingency planning in case a step doesn’t work out.
Understand the Applicability of Digital Transformation
Any digital transformation journey must have applicability to your business. Your organization must evaluate how well current applications are meeting business needs while recognizing any issues they are causing, and how transformation could improve them. For instance, your company can embark on software or at least an email solution, you can start by hosting them on the Microsoft Azure Cloud.
Stakeholders like business leaders, supervisors, and end-users, should be consulted to gain a proper understanding of your organization’s workflow systems and hence, thoroughly assess its capabilities to identify which processes are broken, redundant, or manual. This helps determine the processes ripe for digitization. Workflow assessments can either be conducted in-house or outsourced to a third party.
Research Your Industry and Competitors
After assessing your company, it is important to understand how you compare to your direct competitors and your industry. Are your competitors in the midst of their own digital transformation? What digital solutions are they working on? What new technologies or tools are being implemented within your industry? A competitive analysis will help you understand the market and identify opportunities to build a thriving business.
Each digital initiative will be different in scope, resources, and return-on-investment. Prioritize your initiatives based on their value, impact, and estimated effort. Start with simple projects with essential features to test your digital solution’s viability.
Prepare the Entire Company for a Digital Transformation
Communicating your plan and vision for the company is just as important as coming up with the strategy. Indeed, it has widely been acknowledged that successful digital transformation is as much contingent on a cultural change within a business as it is a technological change.
If the value of a transformation is not communicated well, the company may not obtain intrinsic buy-in from employees which could act as a hindrance later on in the journey. Provide employees with transparency, a clear structure and plan, and adequate training to prepare them for the digital transformation.
At Technology Management Concepts, we believe that digital transformation is a technology opportunity, and you should not miss it. Since 1987, thousands of organizations have partnered with TMC to rethink their business processes and technology, allowing their employees to achieve more while improving their customers’ experience in an ever-changing global economy. Contact us to learn more and get started.
