The term ‘Digital Transformation’ is not a new expression in the business landscape. Rather, it has been there for quite some time now. However, the scale and manner of its occurrence in the present times is quite different from what it had been earlier.
Look around and you will find every business establishment embracing digital transformation at an impressive rate. If that’s not enough, statistical references will help you understand the situation better.
According to IDC’s FutureScape report in 2016, there will be a dramatic surge in making commitments towards ‘Digital Transformation’ initiatives. The desire to provide unsurpassed digital experience to customers is what drives businesses towards digitization.
In this light, it becomes essential to discuss the significance and need for digital transformations. Let’s prepare a roadmap of this discussion that helps us track the importance of digital transformations and the most effective ways of adopting it.
Customer experience and personalization
Customers have become the most important factor for every business. With rapid digitization, all they wish for is personalized experiences and speedy operations. The availability of innumerable options has compelled them to avoid disconnected, inconsistent, and slow digital experiences.
If your services or products fail to meet their demands or become too complicated to handle, your customers will simply abandon them and move on. Therefore, an unmatched digital experience will not be a choice, but a necessity for your business.
In a nutshell, digitization or digital transformation will prove to be the giant leap towards unparalleled success and development.
The truth behind embracing digital transformation
A fully functional business will inevitably require performing both front-office and back-office tasks. Quite naturally, they will require digitizing functions carried out in both these departments. However, reality has a very different story to narrate.
According to Economist Intelligence Unit, a mere 18% of business organizations have successfully integrated both front-office and back-office functions. And only 10% of them have embraced digitization. These market reports present a crystal clear picture of the real scenario.
Embracing digitization is easier said than done. Transforming the manual business processes into fully digitized operations will involve technologies, workforce, and critical processes. And each of these factors will play a vital role in the entire endeavor.
Tips for adopting digital transformation
With this, we arrive at unraveling or unlocking the most effective strategies that make digital conversions work. Take a look at the following points for transforming your business into a customer-centric digital organization.
1. Leadership
As a focused enterprise, you will surely have certain goals, mission, vision, and objectives. Your digital transformation endeavors must be aligned with these objectives, thus helping you create a robust digital marketing plan.
On the contrary, digitization strategies that are out-of-the-blue will create a series of challenges for your business.
Business owners will require addressing the point-challenges alongside aligning their present objectives as well as connected initiatives with digitization strategies. And it’s here that businesses feel the need for strong process management. If you wish to achieve digital agility, honing your leadership skills will be the first thing to do.
2. Say ‘I’ for Integration
If you are a new-age organization, ‘integration’ will be the key for you. While opting for digital transformation, make sure it helps you leverage your existing IT technologies. Your focus should not only be on the digitization of front-end technologies but also towards leveraging the existing ones.
In case the former situation arises, your digital transformation strategies will remain underutilized.
3. The need for focus
The entire planning for digital transformation must begin from the scratch. There’s a need for realizing what your organization is and what it aims to be. Since it will turn out to be a colossal transformation program, you will require setting your goals right.
The project management team will need to stay grounded, and unperturbed by the temporary changes taking place in the organization.
4. Centralizing content
With rapid digitization, content creation has become an easy task for one and all. You will receive new contents from various sources. And that’s what increases their chance of being inconsistent, diverse, and scattered.
Under such circumstances, centralization of contents will prove to be the key to targeting contents to potential customers.
5. Believe in engagement
Digitization has become more pervasive than ever. Therefore, participation at every level is a highly crucial requisite. As a passionate and judicious entrepreneur, you must strive hard towards ensuring perfect engagement at all levels of your organizations. That will prevent segmentation, thus fostering cross-team collaboration.
Final thoughts
A customer-oriented and fully digitized organization will play the perfect role in transforming the entire business arena. And this change will undoubtedly be for the better. If you are still relying on manual processes for running your organization, it’s high time to adopt and embrace digital transformation. If you are interested to see whether you are on the right path to digital transformation with your existing systems and infrastructure, you can utilize our Open Source Readiness Assessment (OpeRA). The holistic solution lets you know of your IT health and provide recommendations so that you can embrace ‘digital’ wholeheartedly.
