Important Update
Recent research on digital transformation carried out by 451 Research, over 50% of organizations in healthcare, finance, and retail industries have launched a digital transformation initiative that spans across all departments.
And about 20% to 25% of the other 50% is taking a siloed approach in their digital transformation.
In total, they are all going to spend over $1.3 trillion in their efforts to use automation to streamline their operations, in the hope of becoming more efficient, improve their customer’s experience, and take an early lead in digital transformation.
However, McKinsey & Co says about 75% of them may not achieve their digital transformation goals.
In this guide, you are going to discover 10 mistakes you could be making in your digital transformation journey, and possibly correct them.
Digital transformation does not mean the same thing for different organizations. It is even different for different departments within the same organization.
For the IT department, it could mean getting more involved in the daily operations of different departments and having a strategy to do it right.
For the finance department, digital transformation could mean using digital technology to streamline the department’s operations, eliminate human error, and increase visibility between it and the accounting department.
In that regard, the best approach is to define your digital transformation around your business goals, mission, and vision. Defining digital transformation around bigger and more fundamentals aspects of your organization makes it easy to see it for what it truly is.
It is a journey that can help your organization to achieve its many objectives, and its path can only be defined by what you want to achieve. It could be installing RPA bots, but the RPA bots themselves are not the goal of digital transformation.
Most companies that embrace digital transformation, but look at it as an IT project, are doomed to fail. Technology is a critical enabler when transforming a business or organization, in order to improve service delivery, and ultimately grow sales or increase overall efficiency.
However, digital transformation is just a means to an end. It must have both the technical and business support for it to bring about meaningful change. Otherwise, executing digital transformation with only technological support will cause it to fail in the long run.
The best approach is instead of thinking of digital transformation as an IT project, you should focus on what your customer wants and how technology can help. Other questions to consider include how the business can use technology to meet its current and future objectives.
The next step is then to find out which technologies to use and the steps to follow.
Even when both the technical and business teams are working together, the way they define or understand the project terms can be different. That can often lead to frustrations or a poorly executed project. A good example is defining a digital solution as a minimally viable solution.
The technical team may only consider the “minimal” aspect of the solution, while the business team will focus on the viable aspect of the solution. Another scenario can be where the business team says they need a solution that can support up to 100,000 users concurrently.
However, what they need is a solution that can support up to 100 users at launch. When the technical team decides to take build the solution, they will be working to build a solution with a capacity to support 100,000 users.
That can take a lot of time and resources, instead of focusing on a small but scalable solution for 100 users. The business team will then wonder why the IT team is taking so long, to implement what should have been a simple solution.
To address such issues, both teams should define what they expect from the project, and keep jargon to a minimum. Both business and technical teams should state their expectations clearly, along with timelines for implementing them.
Many companies are facing a skills shortage in areas such as AI and machine learning, which are crucial in digital transformation. If you are facing an in-house skill shortage, you have to bring in experienced members to your existing team.
You need to have your employees on board by discussing the roles they can play in the digital transformation. Some of the things to discuss include the pain points the digitization process will address.
Digital transformation could mean increased transparency, employees having to train for new roles, and some outsourced services getting automated. There are many people who may not be happy with such changes.
Instead of accommodating such views and slowing down the process, you may have to make tough choices and fire such employees. You could also have to terminate some contracts.
If you have a budget to meet your digital automation needs, you could be tempted to carry out all the automation at once. However, that could lead to failure if it takes much longer to deliver any success story.
Stakeholders can start to lose faith, which can, in turn, lead to multiple failures in different departments. What you need to do is implement digital transformation in small bits, until you complete the whole project.
That will allow you to achieve smaller successes throughout the project, and inspire confidence in your team. That can then lead to a well-motivated team and supportive stakeholders.
Thinking of digital transformation as a one-time event or a seasonal event can lead to improper planning or strategy. What you need to do is realize that digital transformation is now the new norm.
That will allow you to adjust your operations to align with your digital transformation strategy.
You should not neglect security and compliance when implementing digital transformation. Instead, those two should be a part of your digital transformation strategy. Failure to do that can lead to a patchwork kind of security measure, which is riddled with security vulnerabilities.
You need a platform to run your digital services. The platform we are talking about here is an ERP platform that allows you to manage big data, support IoT, and mobility of services.
Once you have chosen a platform from which to run your digital services, you should not change it, unless it isn’t meeting your technical or business needs. You should, therefore, choose it carefully.
Whether it is not having an experienced and skilled team, failing to see digital transformation as a continuous process, or implementing so much at once, such as mistakes could cost you dearly.
We hope you found this guide to be informative, and you are going to make the right changes.
Do you need help with your digital transformation? Contact us now, and let our experts help you through this crucial process.
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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