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What are Main Components of Digital Transformation?

What are Main Components of Digital Transformation?

Having a successful digital transformation strategy is undoubtedly one of the most important components of your business’s future.

The survey conducted by Constellation Research, a well-known technology research, and advisory firm based in Silicon Valley, reveals that >60% of participants believe that having a working digital transformation strategy is essential to improving the organization’s performance.

It’s essential to improving your organization’s productivity and efficiency, driving your business’s performance metrics higher, and enhancing the consumer experience.

Many innovative and emergent technologies have come to the limelight that is the backbone of the digital transformation. Technologies like Blockchain and Quantum Computing are revolutionizing the way the businesses used to operate.

The AI, IoT, and Big Data collectively form the technological backbone of business transformation for any modern organization.

Leadership
Strategy
Disruption
Technology
Customer Experience

But having said that, emergent technologies like IoT and AI are inherently complicated and hard to deploy in the business setting. If not used with care, they might even cause severe financial and monetary loss and end up disturbing the streamlined workflow. Hence an organization needs strong leadership as well as a systematic strategy to enforce the transition.

Integrating these technologies might not always be very easy for small-scale businesses. First and foremost, they lack the financial and technological resources in most of the cases to embrace the digital transformation.

Large and medium-scale enterprises, on the other hand, invest a significant fraction of their total budget to facilitate a smooth transition. Digital transformation helps change the way the organizations work. It is an effective way of increasing the customer satisfaction and performance metrics of the organization.

1. Leadership

The full advantage of digital transformation could not be taken without executive vision and apt leadership. Countless surveys and studies have shown that transformations that are not backed by the organization’s governing body are either ad-hoc or unorganized; even more so in the absence of effective leadership.

Point to note here is that the term digital transformation is not only about transforming technologically – the change is all about having a clear vision of what is needed and what needs to be changed.

This also tells us that the leader need not be a technology-geek, but she needs to have a holistic view so that she can cultivate the right digital culture. She should pay close attention to improving the company’s organizational performance, revenue as well as the end-user experience.

Utilizing the collective intelligence is the key to success here. The path to the transformation becomes much smoother once one understands and starts reshaping the competitive landscape to their advantage.

2. Strategy

Having a robust and proven transformation strategy makes the journey a lot smoother. An apt leadership accompanied by a well-tested, battle-hardened digital strategy is the key to success for any business. Defining the outcome helps achieve the goal as well as optimize the business processes.

First, one needs to have a clear vision of what they are aiming for, what the transformed space looks like. Has it documented so that everybody has a clear understanding of the ultimate goal? Second, pay close attention to the known pain-points.

Is the customer experience known to suffer when the new cloud support is included from the available test cases? Work on it and try to minimize the issue, if not possible to avoid it at all.

The take-home message is that you should never put more emphasis on technology than the strategy. The technology helps an organization boost its performance, but harnessing the technology optimally to deliver the value proposition is the perk of having a robust strategy.

3. Disruption

Businesses need disruptive elements – these disruptors keep the organization alive. Disruptive elements like digital automation, various collaborative tools, and analytics tools collectively help transform and evolve the total value chain of the business.

Transforming the operations digitally is the key to transforming your business. Many big enterprises follow a similar paradigm – they start small, transforming the processes one at a time. They eventually cover the entirety of the operations slowly, but surely.

Another approach could be to digitally enhance the products directly, instead of the business processes. The goal eventually is to modify or upgrade the old methods with faster and more efficient ways.

4. Technology

Although the technological aspect comes after fixing the roadmap, it’s an important part of the whole process nonetheless. First comes the evaluation process. The process involves comparing and evaluating the capabilities of the current machinery followed by transformed tools.

This process, however, is not a one-size-fits-all solution. This is an iterative procedure that goes through countless iterations of failure, evaluation, and adaptation steps.

Each time an approach is failed for some reason, be it internal operational or completely technical, an evaluation step usually follows it, and finally, necessary measures are taken according to the evaluation results.

5. Customer Experience

Now that you have taken care of the technological and the strategical aspects, you need to focus on improving the customer experience. Ultimately, maintaining a satisfied and reliable consumer base is the ultimate goal of any product based company.

Identifying the exact customer needs with the help of the knowledge of human behavior is an important part of data extraction. Use past test cases and surveys to identify the associated pain-points. Digital media is a powerful tool for gathering this information.

Using social media engagement is an excellent starting point. The newest technologies can help you too in this matter; various text analytics and data mining tools come in handy for understanding the pain-points.

But stashing the data is not the final goal, using it to come up with an effective plan is. The last step is to extract the insights from the accumulated data.

The long-term goal is to enhance and upgrade the existing machinery, and leverage it to increase ROI, and boost the efficiency and productivity using the tools offered by the latest technological advancements such as Big Data, AI, and ML.

The best way to end the day is to quote Howard King: “Businesses don’t transform by choice because it is expensive and risky. Businesses go through transformation when they have failed to evolve.”