What is Digital Transformation? A Guide for Business
With how fast everything is moving online and becoming digitalized, it’s easy to fall behind your competitors. If you want your company to flourish in this market, you must keep up with the changes.
Definition of Digital Transformation
If you google what is digital transformation, you’ll get many different and sometimes contradictory definitions. It’s not surprising, given how complex the subject is, and also because digital transformation can look different for different types of businesses.
Let’s clarify:
Digital transformation is a process of implementing digital technology in all aspects of your business. It significantly alters how you do business and provides value to consumers. The goal is to redesign the firm to emphasize the client’s demands while leveraging the power of digital technology to create a seamless connection with them.
Digital transformation sometimes requires changes that could have been hardly imagined, especially for firms that have been functioning in specific ways for decades. It will alter your thoughts about people, processes, and even corporate culture.
For the process of digital transformation to go smoothly, defining the reason and ‘why’ is the first step. Once you have ‘why,’ creating a clear path to the final goal becomes easier.
Guide to Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is a complicated process, and it can be even more difficult if you don’t have a planned guide on how the process will go.
Defining the vision and the end goal.
Any change needs the cause and reason why. In the digital transformation case, you need to define the aspects of your business that need improvement, the workflows that are lacking in efficiency, and the new technologies you can implement that will make your job easier and faster.
Once you know the changes you want to see, it’s time to start thinking of the resources and tools you will need to make those changes happen. Creating a detailed blueprint of the whole process will make your job much easier.
Ensuring you have all the tools and resources needed for the change
The next thing you will be focusing on is ensuring you have all the tools and resources required for the change, and if you do not, then plan out how to acquire them first. In most cases, the employers are the driving force of digital transformation. You will have to train them if they do not possess the knowledge needed for the planned changes.
Choosing the right approach and technology
Making all these digital transformation changes for your business is not easy. Making your current employees learn new software skills will take a long time and wouldn’t be a wise investment since they are supposed to focus on their specialized job. You can hire a professional software company to help you deploy digital adoption strategies much faster.
Make sure to manage organizational changes constantly
The world is continuously changing, and if you want to have a successful business, you must keep up with these changes. Digital transformation isn’t a one-time thing. You have to manage evolving business needs.
You will need organizational unity and open-mindedness from the whole team for your digital transformation to work successfully. You’ll have to be ready for any resistance that usually comes with the change.
Benefits of Digital Transformation
The key to successful digitalization is knowing what benefits it can bring your business. Although the process can be pretty complicated, it can bring value to your company. Let’s discuss some of the benefits.
Increased revenue
Many studies and reports support the claim that digital transformation can boost revenue. Companies that implement digital transformation increase their revenue by 25% more than those that do not. According to the SAP Center for Business Insights and Oxford Economics, 80% of enterprises that completed their digital transformation boosted corporate earnings, while 85% grew market share.
Increased productivity
Implementing different digital technologies in your business’s workflow can quickly increase your work’s productivity and efficiency. You’ll be able to complete many tasks faster and more precisely using bots and modern technology.
Humans cannot match the speed and accuracy with which business intelligence software and data analytics solutions can collect and analyze data. But what they can do is utilize that analysis to make faster judgments. While these bots are in charge of tasks they can do faster and more efficiently, your employers can focus more on tasks that need more human resources.
Improved resource management
As they adapt, businesses are replacing outdated systems that used to serve specific business units with modern IT structures meant to optimize operations and promote the smooth flow of data across all departments. According to experts, this end-to-end digital technology approach has aided CIOs and other executives in removing duplicate and unnecessary technologies and related expenses.
Better customer engagement
Businesses may use digital technology to gather, store, and analyze consumer data to understand more about their customer’s wants and needs. All these data enable the company to make its service more personalized. It makes it easy to build and deliver products and services suited to each customer’s tastes and needs.
Digital Transformation Mistakes to Avoid
Not standardizing data models.
Dealing with large amounts of data from different departments of your company, especially when data formats are not the same, can be challenging and time-consuming. Therefore to avoid this mistake, combine each department’s data and standardize the data model to ensure consistency for cross-department searches and modifications.
