Important Update
About 70% of all businesses never complete their digital transformation journey, or they never achieve all their objectives. Most of them fail to achieve their digital transformation goals fully, because of a poor implementation strategy.
In this guide, you will discover how to avoid such pitfalls when implementing your digital transformation strategy.
You need to have a clear picture of what you want to achieve through digital transformation. And you have to state it in writing so you can continually refer to it, as well as share it among stakeholders.
While digital transformation is partly about improving customer experience, there are also other important aspects to it too. With a well thought out transformation strategy, some of the objectives you come up with include:
Your digital transformation objective may differ slightly or widely from the above, but you should have them. Without them, you do not stand a better chance of succeeding in your digital implementation.
The second step is to learn about all technology enablers in the market, and then leverage on them when implementing your digital transformation. These enablers include context and personas, human-machine learning, intelligent automation, the Internet of Things, and cybersecurity.
Cybersecurity is crucial when implementing digital transformation. Without integrating security measures, the vulnerabilities will eventually slow down or completely halt your digitized processes.
In turn, that will prevent you from seeing any tangible benefits from the digital transformation.
However, the core SMAC stack is still relevant to digital transformation, and it is still evolving. Mobility now includes wearable technologies, and the cloud has evolved to include concepts such as software-defined data centers and hybrid IT.
These key enablers now form the digital platform you need to implement digital transformation. Considering each of them as part of the larger digital infrastructure can help you maximize current and future benefits, of your digital transformation.
You can use the technology enablers we have discussed above to create a virtualized environment that is also highly distributed. Such an environment can act as a powerful ecosystem for on-demand services, which can help to cut operational costs and increase visibility in all processes.
Your third step is to select which of the technology enablers you are going to work with, to achieve your business objectives.
Your business objective could include improving customer experience, streamlining management decision-making processes, integrating cybersecurity defenses, and optimizing the use of infrastructural resources.
Overall, you can think of this conceived platform as a reference template, of the technologies and approach you are going to need, to benefit from the digital transformation.
The next step of implementing digital transformation is for IT to decide the “how” and “what” of implementing digital transformation. Implementing digital transformation is not just about selecting the products and services.
You also have to consider how you are going to manage, develop, and design digital services. Knowledge of the lifecycle of digital services and products is critical in running on a digitized business and maintaining a competitive advantage.
The key approaches that shape how IT services are provided and consumed are agile, intelligent automation, digital service management, personas and context, DevOps, and as-a-service infrastructure.
The key approaches are crucial in accelerating development, deployment, management, and consumption of digital services.
By mastering these key areas, you can take full advantage of digital services when managing digital touchpoints, transacting and interacting with customers.
Once you have settled on how you will source and manage your digital ecosystem, the next step is to choose the specific enabling and disruptive technologies. You can determine which ones you need, based on the business outcomes you want to achieve.
Instead of having a mega-platform that can do anything and everything, you can focus on having highly distributed, virtualized, and best-in-class products or services. Most of the services will come bundled, especially those that are being provided by software-defined data centers.
That eliminates the need to assemble all services yourself. Moreover, this setup allows business managers to select what they need from a list of options.
For instance, to create a digital experience for customers, a manager may choose a customer-centricity, analytics, omnichannel integration, and persona-driven capabilities.
The above capabilities will allow the business to support a variety of work patterns, integrate and redesign business processes, determine customer behavior and expectations, and engage customers through social, mobile, and cloud computing platforms.
Implementing digital transformation does not mean doing away with all the existing applications and infrastructure. Instead, you can retire some of the existing elements, and integrate others into the new platform.
That will mean having a hybrid environment for some time until all the existing systems attain their end-of-life cycles. However, that also means that both the new and older systems must be interoperable.
With the use of elements such as RPA bots, you can implement interoperability requirements, while still improving user experience. Moreover, using agile and iterative elements, the digital platform should simplify and secure access to the front-end and back-end infrastructure.
In that regard, the business can deliver positive benefits for customers, employees, and other stakeholders to access its services through the digital platform.
Overall, focusing on meeting certain objectives and goals, can help you to implement your digital strategy successfully.
We hope you found this guide to be informative and insightful, to take action and implement your digital strategy. Are you facing any challenges coming up with your digital implementation strategy?
About the Author
ByteScout Team of Writers
ByteScout has a team of professional writers proficient in different technical topics. We select the best writers to cover interesting and trending topics for our readers. We love developers and we hope our articles help you learn about programming and programmers.
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