Digital Transformation is no longer just another industry buzzword.
With the onset of the pandemic and other external factors, many traditional businesses were forced to take their business processes online. While many organizations have already begun their digital journey, there have been a few roadblocks.
We’ve seen teams and processes often operating in digital silos – leading to information and reporting gaps. Another issue is the lack of a single source of truth where data-based decision-making is concerned, and so, organizations are unable to leverage different data points to derive actionable business insights.
That’s why businesses need a complete Digital Transformation.
Defining The Scope of Digital Transformation
When we talk about Digital Transformation, we talk about changing the fundamentals to make operations faster, more efficient, and better. Digitizing your business is an important step toward Digital Transformation. But merely having a digitized business process doesn’t mean that your business has been digitally transformed.
5 Features of a Digitally Transformed Business
1. Transformation of an entire business model, not just a business process
A digitally transformed organization reinvents its business models to better understand client demands by leveraging digital assets such as data, analytics, curated data, and AI. Differentiation is driven by adaptation and reinvention, which creates a sustainable moat. Connecting all business processes and breaking down silos has a disruptive effect on how firms do business.
2. Customer-centricity
A business that has undergone digital transformation verifies and quantifies the factors that create and hinder customer value. This transformation is about restructuring business models & monetizing sources of customer value while eliminating those inhibitors. Digital Transformation makes it possible to capture, store, utilize, and analyze data from various customer touchpoints and give customers what they really want.
3. Creating new digital assets
Businesses that have digitally transformed adhere to analytical profiles and modules that contain data description, statistics, calculations, and more, where domain expertise is incorporated.
4. Adapting to changing customer needs
Transitioning from predictive to prescriptive so as to autonomously adapt to changing customer needs – that’s the nature of Digital Transformation. While your business can make use of historical data/trends to predict customer behavior, a more effective and reliable method is to use Machine Learning models to understand and adapt to your customer’s changing preferences.
5. AI-driven autonomous operations and policy enforcement
As the volume of data increases, autonomous decision-making becomes central to a company’s operations. Within an ever-changing environment, AI continuously optimizes, automates, and operationalizes the organization’s business. That’s where digitally transforming every node and business process can help create much-needed business governance.
Before you begin your Digital Transformation journey…
On a fundamental level, Digital Transformation helps your company improve its processes and, in turn, its workflow.
AI and Cloud Computing can help you improve your Supply Chain Management, and this will in turn help reduce time-to-market, thus enhancing your customers’ experiences and increasing your sales. A Data Warehouse can help you benefit from all the data at your disposal to help you make better marketing decisions. It will also help you understand what your customers are looking for so that you can innovate faster and thus focus your resources and efforts in the right place.
A good digital transformation strategy will also enable you to automate the majority of your processes, allowing your workforce to focus on innovation and growth rather than operations management.
Building your Digital Transformation strategy
Here’s your step-by-step guide to begin your Digital Transformation journey.
1. Define the scope of your requirements
The first step is to conduct an audit – to identify the gaps and potential areas in your business that could benefit from Digital Transformation. Here’s where a professional digital transformation consulting company can help you chart out your Digital Transformation journey.
2. Create a roadmap
Once you’re aware of the gaps, it’s time to create a roadmap with actionable items and timelines. By working with experts, you’ll be able to create a detailed action plan for achieving the Digital Transformation you need.
Remember, the transition from traditional processes to all-digital should be gradual – so that your team gets the time they need, to adjust to these changes.
3. Implementation
As you build new digital infrastructure or upgrade your existing one, you’ll need to make sure there’s a proper, well-synced handover. This is to ensure that there is little to no disruption of work. A good IT Service provider can help make sure that the transition is seamless.
4. Creating a Digital-First culture
Now that you’re all set to become a digitally driven company, it’s time to build a digital-first culture. To drive innovation, you need your team to think digitally.
You may choose to revise the roles your CIO/CTO plays in the company or hire new talent. It is always a good idea to conduct regular IT training to ensure that your non-technical staff is well-equipped and knowledgeable about new technology.
Wrapping Up
Here’s why you need to start your Digital Transformation journey today:
1. To improve efficiency
Adopting a digital-first policy will help you streamline your existing operations. Having all your processes digitally integrated will prevent your teams from operating in silos, plug information, and data gaps, and provide a single source of truth for all your data needs, thus optimizing your operations. Automating manual and redundant tasks can help save time and bring down error rates.
2. To save costs
Digital Transformation removes redundancies. Companies can identify areas that can be optimized for costs and introduce automation and other efficiency measures, saving significant costs in the long run.
2. To drive business growth
Digitally transformed companies are more agile and can respond quickly to dynamic market forces, adapt to new technologies, and embrace new ways of working. In a competitive environment, this agility is a definite strength.
Digital Transformation can take your business to greater heights. However, the question is:
- As a company that relies on traditional processes, how do start the journey? How do you work through the nuances?
As a company that relies on traditional processes, how do start the journey? How do you work through the nuances?
