Important Update
Digital transformation is essential for your business if you want to remain competitive, grow your profits, and keep your customers happy. So, how do you achieve it? In this guide, you are going to discover the keys to successful digital transformation.
In most businesses, the top executives tend to delegate the implementation of digital projects to their IT departments. While that seems to be a natural fit, it creates additional challenges when implementing digital transformation.
The absence of the top executives in the implementation phase means they may define the transformation well, but fail to give a strategy for implementing it holistically.
The outcome is the digital transformation projects often start without all the key decision-makers in different departments, buying into them. That slows down the implementation process, and often, the business may not realize the benefits of digital transformation on time.
Developing a vision that can lead to digital transformation can address that mishap. Here are some of the things to include when developing such a vision:
The vision should define the business drivers behind the digital transformation. These are the desired outcomes after the digital transformation. They include efficient delivery of services or products, cost-effective business expansion, or lower overhead costs.
These drivers should be backed by available data and past feedback from the various departments.
Set clear goals that you want to achieve by the end of the transformation. You can use these goals later, to determine the success of your digital transformation.
These goals may include intelligent use of data, increased collaborations through the digital platform, and better engagement with customers.
There should be a clear roadmap on how, and when each department can step in to implement digital transformation. That helps to prevent conflicts from occurring later on when making certain changes can negatively impact business operations.
Overall, each department should have an opportunity to discuss how the digitization process will impact their operations. They should then give possible suggestions on how to implement digitization flawlessly within their department.
You should define all critical business operations and how to transform them, without causing critical disruptions. The digital transformation should help all departments move forward, instead of slowing down.
Therefore, reinforcing the critical business functions in readiness for the digital transformation must happen before rolling it out.
You should implement digital transformation based on the expected benefits. Therefore, you should not come up with a use case, just to use it for sourcing funds only.
Instead, each department should benefit directly or indirectly from the use case, for the whole project to become a success.
If the use case is automating certain aspects of customer support services, then all departments should set their goals on how to benefit from it.
Digital transformation should be user-centered and focus on issues that affect customers. You should look at it not just from the business perspective, but also from the customer’s perspective.
Find out what are their pain points when they interact with your business, their needs, and their wants.
That will allow you to develop a digital solution that will have the greatest positive impact on your customers and your business. Such a solution will align your business goals with your customer preferences.
By making digital transformation user-centered, you can prioritize digitizing sections that will have the greatest impact, thereby lowering the cost of digitization.
Data is an important part of digital transformation, and you should be ready for it. You need to be ready to prepare to move your data, share it, as well as having it consumed. In that regard, you need to have a strategy on how data in your possession will be structured, managed, sorted, and protected.
You will also need a method to validate it, by having a “single source of truth,” and adhering to national and international data privacy regulations. Once such measures are in place, you need to collect and hoard as much data as possible.
The data will come in handy when you want to analyze the impact of your digital transformation, as well as predicting and analyzing your customers’ buying behavior.
You need to hold your managers accountable when it comes to using and adopting the new digital platform. To do that, you need to include measurements of adoption and utilization in the digitization program. Managers and workers also need to be educated on how the changes will benefit them.
That will go a long way in ensuring the digital transformation will have a positive impact on your business operations. The implementation plan is therefore not cast in stone, it may have to change. You can create reinforcements where necessary, throughout the digital transformation process.
Properly constituted governance structures at all levels of your organization must support the digital transformation. To do that, they must be representative of all those tasked with implementing the digital transformation.
Moreover, you should set up communication channels to share expectations, align business operations, and monitor progress. There should be a clear decision-making process, and the decision-makers should be empowered by having checks and balances.
That will bring about efficacy and compliance throughout the digital transformation journey, and eliminate decision-making bottlenecks.
The digital transformation plan should be flexible enough to take into account any lessons learned or new ideas and applying them immediately. The changes should be informed by customer behavior, feedback, and employee suggestions from their experience of the digitization process.
A successful digital transformation is possible, only if it makes the delivery of products or services easy, for all those involved. In that regard, all suggestions and improvements on the original plan should primarily rely on business data and user feedback.
The digital transformation plan should include a plan on how to implement changes, and how to respond to end-user requests and needs. It should also include methods for tracking and monitoring changes.
That will keep the digital transformation at par with the market changes, and the scale of digitization at all times. Overall, continuous delivery acts like the North Star for the digital transformation team. It allows them to develop, test, and release digital functionalities, in an efficient, fast, and consistent manner.
Digital transformation can happen flawlessly if you incorporate the above keys in its implementation plan. These keys can help you plan for the transformation as a continuous business and technical process, as opposed to implementing it as a one-time event.
Do you need help to incorporate the above keys to a successful digital transformation, in your project? Contact us now, and let us discuss how we can help you.
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