A talking point that has been highly popular over time is Digital Transformation. Let’s just take a step back and answer the most basic question, “What does digital transformation actually mean for your company”, in the middle of all the global white noise around businesses spending substantial time, efforts, and money in digital transformation? While the shift to the digital economy began before COVID-19, the process has definitely been boosted by the pandemic. Organizations are expected to transfer their practices digitally to survive the challenges of the pandemic with strict lockout policies and public safety laws to continue to service their clients.
What is Digital Transformation?
The introduction of new technologies to trigger radical change within an organization is digital transformation. Although technology is an integral component of digital transformation, it is not the only aspect. For continued growth, digital transformation involves market leaders to reconsider their corporate practices and processes in order to change their business.
Businesses should expect to see increases in employee retention, consumer loyalty, and business creativity by adopting a business development approach and incorporating technological solutions. Digital transformation has become a topic of business sustainability, and that’s not just a talking point.
Why is Digital Transformation Important?
For many reasons, an organization may adopt digital transformation. But the most likely reason, hands down, is that they have to: It’s a matter of survival. The capacity of a company to quickly respond to supply chain changes, time to market demands, and constantly shifting consumer preferences have become crucial in the aftermath of the pandemic. In today’s age of digitalization, digital transformation skills are applied to organizations of all sizes. What are the motivating forces for this digital transformation? The most prevalent explanations are constructive improvements in the culture of the organization, streamlined company practices, and increased efficiency.
The topic, these days, on everyone’s mind is digital transformation (DT). More and more business owners feel the need to switch from the traditional way of operating and introduce digital transformation into the operations of the company. It can be overwhelming to identify the first steps and the overall business modernization process when thinking about DT for your business. We realize that, and we have formulated a brief explanation for selecting the best path for digital transformation and effectively optimizing it in the future to help you start smoothly.
Formulating an Effective Digital Transformation Strategy
Mentioned below are five necessary elements of designing a successful digital transformation strategy for your company:
Review your Present Business State
When you don’t know where to start, you can hardly build the best strategy for potential transitions. At the very beginning of your digital transformation process, undertaking a company audit will support you with the following:
- Get a deeper understanding of your company’s culture and values.
- Outline a clear structure of the internal procedures, processes, and roles.
- Assess the skillset of your workforce.
- Find your business weaknesses and low points.
Establish Your Business Goals
Its alignment with the corporate objectives and mission is the main success driver in every Digital Development Strategy. You are prepared to develop the company priorities and target outcomes after you have carried out your corporate assessment and accepted the concept from all stakeholders. We encourage our clients to adopt the ‘Why, When, and How’ rule in order to establish the proper targets for the company digitalization. Ask yourself the following three essential questions:
- Why do you need to transform?
- What do you need to transform?
- How can you transform?
While going through the ‘what, when, why’ rule with any task, you can identify smart priorities to reach and solve your company needs.
Conduct Pilot Tests
The digital transition is not easy, as certain small adjustments or full changes to processes and systems that have evidently performed well before may be needed. In a completely new environment, with new technology and roles, the workers will need to work. In addition, digital transformation can also impact the consumer experience.
Run pilot tests before deploying new concepts and technologies to render things painless for the staff and consumers. As a consequence, you can evaluate the reaction of your test users to the app, find glitches and bottlenecks, and verify if you are ready for full-scale device deployment. The key steps to successfully run pilot tests are:
- Define clear outcomes for a pilot test and ensure you can measure them at the end
- Create a testing group consisting of your employees and customers
- Conduct the testing
- Collect user’s feedback during the process and conduct a survey or group discussion after testing
- Fix bugs and any issues that your users report.
Define a Clear Digital Transformation Path
You will build a comprehensive plan for meeting your objectives when you have already agreed on your company goals and find the deficiencies that need to be covered. Below, when constructing a strategic digital transformation plan, we outline the most critical measures to consider:
- Think about reframing your corporate infrastructure
- Find out what skills and knowledge your employees are lacking and develop a plan to upskill them
- Update your technology stack
- Outline the key goals with milestones and priorities
- Identify the key roles and players for each stage of the digital transformation strategy.
Be Prepared for Changes in Culture
Last but not least, the culture of the company is an aspect of effective transformation. Other than simply adopting emerging technology, digital transformation often alters the attitude of the workers. Researchers have identified two validated methods that motivate the workers to work differently. The first strategy is to showcase the importance of the improvements to emerge. Organizations with senior administrators who have a strong vision for digital innovation and are active in the transition are most likely to thrive. Encourage the staff to play with innovative concepts, encourage them to learn new technology, and listen to their suggestions.
Constant collaboration is another technique for rendering cultural shifts painless. Share the core concept of the digital transformation with your colleagues, why you’ve agreed to do so, what they can predict, and what advantages everyone can get from these improvements. The value of cultural adjustment cannot be overlooked as it may delay your transition or result in the loss of key workers.
Benefits of Digitally Transforming your Company
Digital transformation has already started to evolve. Some benefits of digitally transforming are:
- Enhancing customer experience with more personalized interactions
- Making business processes flexible and quick
- Accelerating business growth
- Opening ample opportunities for partnership with other companies and globalization
- Nurturing digital culture and empowering employees through continuous learning
- Improving data gathering and analysis
- Keeping pace with the fierce competition
- Opening new markets and achieving higher profitability.
How Can We Help You?
In a highly dynamic market climate, such as the one we have today, digital transformation adoption is a “must-do” thing. But bear in mind that success arrives only if you create a stable base for the company’s cost-effective digital enhancement and align yourself with the right technologies, such as low-code ones, and the right collaborators to move alongside you. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions. In this digital transformation effort, our team of specialists, at Riz and Mona Consultancy, would be more than willing to assist you and your company.
