June 1, 2022 By: Tanuj Singh
A version of this Blog was first published on the CXO Outlook.
Organizations have evolved through digital transformation and have been modernizing and innovating traditional business models. As Digital transformation enhances interaction with customers, it improves user experience by enhancing productivity across the organization, employee engagement, managing business risks, and generating bigger revenue.
IDC predicts that more than $ 6.8 trillion will be invested in this effort worldwide between 2020 and 2023. However, according to McKinsey, 70% of large transformation programs have failed, addressing the need for a compelling strategy that can support digital transformation.
There are several reasons that can interfere with the process, including poor planning, low commitment, and the adoption of incorrect technology. Therefore, for companies to succeed on their digital transformation journey, let’s look at six important things to consider:
- Assess your Digital Transformation Need: Different business leaders will have different answers when asked “what digital transformation means for your business?” Each business has different clients and needs. Therefore it is critical to determine what exactly digital transformation means for your business.
- Choosing the Right Technology: Technology must be seen as an intermediary that must be integrated across the enterprise and service providers in order to unleash customer value and generate revenue. Therefore, with the right technology, you can define cloud strategies and more, identify potential gaps, build digital platforms, transform your business model, leverage new platforms, and speed up your entire process. Today, new era technologies like Hyperautomation are the driving force behind the next level of digital transformation to help automate and optimize business processes through AI and ML.
- Creating a Roadmap: You need to implement a digital transformation plan and create an effective roadmap. You can’t change everything at once. You also need to make a comprehensive plan of how the transformation will actually work. What needs to change first, what will be most influential and add maximum value, and what are the inevitable obstacles to progress? It is important to create a roadmap to establish when everything should happen, how the business will change in stages, and what digital transformation will look like over a period of time.
- Adopt a customer-centric approach: All digital transformations start with customers and end with customers. It is important to adopt a customer-centric approach as it allows you to leverage technology to create better ways to engage with your customers and deliver a great customer experience at all touchpoints. Making a difference by assessing the impact of your transformation strategy on your customers and industry, rethinking what customer loyalty means and how you interact with your customers as a digital-first company, and establishing a hub to retain your customers. Therefore, as the customer needs evolve, it is also important to re-design the solutions as well.
- Being Employee-centric: We’ve talked about how customer-centric collaboration works, but it goes far beyond that because the digital transformation process needs to be people-centric throughout the organization. Companies should empower and motivate their employees in new ways. When you educate your employees about the skills they need to recognize and embrace new technologies, you open up space for innovation. To overcome all kinds of resistance, people must be given enough space to develop new ideas and experiment with different ways to contribute to change. Therefore, enabling two-way communication between different levels and employees ensures transparency throughout the process which further supports collaboration efforts.
- Creating a Strategy for the Future: Organizations need a strong foundation to be able to adapt to technological changes and customer requirements over the long term. Therefore, the overall approach to analyze, plan, create, operate new applications, and modernize existing applications is of prime importance. Future-proof strategies need to ensure higher business returns at optimized costs. When embarking on a small transformational journey, various challenges can arise, such as lack of leadership support, inefficient processing of data, changing customer needs, etc. For this reason, it is important for leaders to address these challenges by assessing the technological maturity of the organization and developing strategies accordingly.
Digital transformation helps companies to stay competitive and gives them an edge over others in this ever-evolving business environment. Implementing changes in your organization can be difficult, but the benefits of digital transformation are many. Ultimately, the principles of digital transformation will become the business-standard. In the post-pandemic era, digital transformation is largely non-negotiable, so work on projects that improve the customer experience, overcome organizational resistance, and implement appropriate strategies to complete the digital transformation initiative.
