Tag: digital transformation for business
To reiterate John F. Kennedy, “Change is the law of life, and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
The digital world revolves around evolution and change. It is constantly transforming from one stage to the next. Do you feel lost in this metamorphosis of digital transformation? Does the fervent adoption of advanced technology into business processes catch you off-guard and unprepared?
We understand and want to help you navigate and thrive in this new era. Stay with us and continue reading.
What Is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is the process of utilizing digital technology to develop or modify current corporate practices, culture, and consumer experiences to meet shifting business and market requirements. The perks include better company agility, improved efficiency, and, eventually, the creation of new value for shareholders, consumers, and employees.
According to Gartner, 87% of senior business leaders believe that digitalization should be a top priority for businesses, and 91% of organizations across the globe are currently involved in some sort of digital operation. To improve its client experience, a business might implement AI or cloud computing, for instance. Or it might change its supply chain to ensure machine learning is used more effectively. There are innumerable ways to digitalize your business and reap its many benefits.
Why Is Digital Transformation Important?
The pandemic changed the relevance of digital transformation almost overnight. From a way of enhancing customer care, it quickly became embedded into the core operational and innovative aspects of an organization. In this day and age, an organization’s sustainability may be in jeopardy if it fails to implement digital transformation. This is vital to satisfy the demands of the business landscape. As per Statista, digital transformation has been the leading priority for information technology (IT) initiatives for global companies since 2020.
Businesses are using digital solutions to help them customize their interactions, communications, and goods to meet the unique needs of their clients. For instance, a report by Gartner estimates that by the end of 2020, chatbots will power 85% of customer support. Here are some important reasons why businesses are adopting digital tech:
- Improvement Of Customer Experience – Customer experience is at the core of digital. In order to enhance the customer experience, 92% of business leaders are developing sophisticated digital transformation strategies.
- Additional Data-Based Insights – The tracking and analysis of metrics are made possible by going digital. Making efficient decisions and increasing ROI can both be accomplished by using data-driven insights to better understand customers and re-evaluate business strategies.
- Competitive Edge – By developing new goods and services, entering new markets, and enhancing customer comprehension and service, digital transformation enables organizations to achieve a competitive edge.
- Cost-Cutting – By automating procedures, reducing waste, and improving supply chain management, digital transformation lowers business expenses. A McKinsey study found that businesses that completely adopt Digital Transformation can cut costs by up to 50%.
Stages Of Digital Transformation
Digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation are the three major stages of the Digital Transformation process. A successful implementation requires businesses to move from one stage to the next seamlessly.
- Digitization – The transformation of manual (analog) information into digital format, enabling easy manipulation, storage, and transmission, is called digitization. It is the process of moving to a digital business. For instance, converting paper forms into electronic documents.
- Digitalization – Using digital technologies and digitalized data to enable or improve business processes is known as digitalization. For instance, using a marketing website, software, or mobile app to stay in touch with customers and employees is an example of how digitalization may modify an organization’s operating structure and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities.
- Digital Transformation – The use of new and developing technologies to encourage sustainable innovation and creative expansion while making fundamental changes in an array of business-related areas. It enhances all aspects of the organization, including how employees engage with clients and how operations are carried out. For example, it collects insights from previous customer data, behavioral patterns, and purchase history to customize products and services offered. That is one of its many benefits.
How To Discover Where Your Business Stands
Legacy challenges are frequently overcome as part of digital transformation, but how effective is it? Measuring the progress of any effort with well-defined KPIs and metrics is the only way to know how far you have come.
Tips to measure the progress of digital transformation:
- Feedback from your employees and co-workers
- Track fluctuations in customer feedback
- Analyze the data across the different initiatives that you have implemented
Some additional metrics to track include:
- The degree of digital adoption
- Customer satisfaction rankings
Receiving feedback and measuring progress this way can help you locate where your business stands in its Digital Transformation process and improve your strategies to drive better results.
The Future Of Businesses In Digital Transformation
From using cutting-edge technologies to making strategic decisions, Digital Transformation is influencing businesses. It alters how firms operate, streamlining operations, boosting efficiency, and establishing a cultural shift. A prediction by International Data Corporation states that 75% of corporate executives will use digital platforms and ecosystem capabilities by 2025 to increase their platforms’ agility, efficiency, and sustainability.
Here are some future trends in Digital Transformation:
1. Low-Code, No-Code
Low-code, no-code is a method of software development that calls for either very little (low-code) or no (no-code) coding at all. As per studies, low-code and no-code platforms will be used for more than 65% of software development by 2024. The market will be valued at $13.8 billion in that year!
2. Cloud Migration
Cloud migration is the act of moving data and applications from one location, typically a company’s on-premises servers, to a public cloud provider’s servers. The four benefits of cloud migration are efficiency, accessibility, scalability, and security.
3. Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning
AI uses machine learning for data analysis and forecasting to guide efficient digital organizational strategies, personalize interactions, optimize workflows, and offer consistently dependable services 24/7.
Strategizing An Effective Digital Transformation Journey
While undertaking such a big change, it is important to have a foolproof strategy to rely on. Following are a few aspects that you can consider during your digital transformation process:
- Transformation Of Business Strategies – Technology becomes pivotal to business strategy in the aftermath of digital transformation. Operating expenses and inefficiency can be decreased with this strategy.
- Realigning Business Operations – For agility and experimentation, it is essential to transform corporate procedures and adopt new working methods.
- Adopting Novel Methods Of Agility And Experimentation – Modern engineering capabilities must be combined with new working methods as customer expectations and the rate of change increase. Successful digital transformation requires a fundamentally different strategy—one that values the accessibility of technology and the adaptability of people.
- Flexible Technology Is At The Heart Of Long-Lasting Change – Staying fluid and adaptable will enable you to more readily create ecosystem connections that foster speed and scale while also accelerating innovation within your organization.
Watch more: 7 Deadly Mistakes Non-Tech Businesses Make On Tech Projects!
How Can Fingent Help?
Fingent is one of the leading solution providers in the world. We have been around since 2004 and have successfully transformed many businesses from traditional modules into digitalized success stories.
Fingent has expertise in all the technologies that drive a successful digital transformation journey. Specialists in Cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Virtual and Augmented Reality, and more come together to create a holistic digital solution for your business.
Talk with our Digital Consultants, who will analyze your unique requirements and work out a future for your business that is equipped to succeed in the digital age.
Over the years, digital evolution has transformed the way we shop!
The lockdowns and store closures due to the unprecedented events of 2020 has moreover accelerated this evolution and mainstreamed online shopping.
Today consumers don’t just make purchases online. They compare brands, shop for deals, join communities, and engage in immersive experiences. According to Forbes, roughly 21% of all retail purchases will be online in 2023.
There’s no denying that digital technologies are changing the retail industry as we know it. The only question that remains is whether your business is ready for the future of retail.
To help you prepare, we explore the state of the retail industry and shed light on some of the most significant challenges your business faces. Most importantly, we reveal some technology trends you can leverage to compete with major players in the retail space.
Read more: Custom Software Solutions for Retail: All You Need to Know!
The State of the Retail Industry
In a 2023 retail industry outlook report, Deloitte researchers examined how labor challenges, supply chain hurdles, and market volatility would impact retail businesses in the new year.
Of the various predictions made in the report, the most notable is that retail sales growth in the U.S. – barring a recession – will be minimal due to a meager GDP growth forecast of just 0.9%.
Additionally, researchers found that nominal average weekly earnings rose by 8.3% between December 2020 and December 2022. However, real earnings decreased by approximately 5% due to inflation. In other words, consumers have less purchasing power even though their weekly earnings have nominally increased.
In light of these predictions, retail businesses must remain fluid and agile. In 2021, many retailers increased inventory volume by 11% on average to contend with supply chain volatility.
Continuing to maintain an extensive inventory with a potential recession just over the horizon would be unwise, as doing so would leave retailers with less liquidity and could hinder their ability to capitalize on emerging technology trends or shifts in consumer spending habits.
Retail Businesses Must Evolve or Fail
Like many others in the retail industry, you probably hoped 2023 would represent a continued progression toward “normalcy.” However, many of the changes affected by the global pandemic are here to stay. Modern consumers expect a more technology-centric retail experience, even if they choose to shop in-store.
In addition to adapting to the new consumer, you must also navigate the aforementioned economic challenges poised to persist throughout 2023 and beyond. To make matters worse, the quit rate of employees in the retail industry remains at about 4%, significantly higher than the national average.
While these interconnected issues seem to have created a perfect storm, it’s possible for your business not only to survive the future of retail but thrive in it. To do so, you must familiarize yourself with the latest tech trends and how they might affect your reimagined business model.
Key Tech Trends Shaping the Future of Retail
To stay relevant and competitive, we suggest you consider how adopting the following key tech trends can impact your business:
1. A Shift to Digital Goods and Services
Even if your company sells physical products, offering digital goods and services is an excellent way of differentiating your brand from retail businesses that aren’t so forward-thinking.
For instance, you might commission a development agency to create a custom mobile app for your business. You could then use this app to connect with customers, deliver digital goods (i.e., coupons or top customer badges), and nurture feelings of loyalty among your target audience.
You can take this concept further by creating a digital community that lets shoppers share how your products and goods make them feel or improve their daily lives.
2. Omnichannel Shopping Options
The shopping experience is no longer linear. Instead, customers typically interact with a brand along multiple touchpoints and channels before actually making a purchase. With this in mind, you must adopt interconnected technologies to seamlessly guide leads through each phase of the purchasing journey.
What does that look like, exactly? First and foremost, you should have a dynamic, user-friendly, mobile-optimized website in place.
You’ll also need to give consumers multiple ways of interacting with your brand, such as your website, mobile app, and brick-and-mortar store. The top brands are already doing this — your company should follow suit.
3. Social Media-Centric Campaigns
While you already have social media pages for your company, you may not be using these channels to their full potential. The most successful brands have tapped into meme culture, hashtags, influencers, and other trends that are native to social media to reinvent the customer journey.
Putting social media at the center of your marketing campaigns allows you to fuel online shopping in new ways and connect with younger audiences.
There are many ways to up your social media marketing efforts, including hosting live events, holding Q&A sessions, and interacting with followers in the comment section.
4. Automated Pricing
Automated pricing involves using software to set prices according to variables of significance to the store. Automated pricing technologies have become a valuable resource for big-box retailers in recent years. Smaller businesses are catching on, using this convenient technology to ensure that product prices are set to optimize profitability for both online and in-store products.
Implementing pricing automation solutions will reduce the workload on your staff, as they’ll no longer have to set prices manually. This will help you overcome labor shortages and improve productivity. Automated pricing tools also allow you to deliver better value to customers by running short-term sales or discounts.
Read more: How To Power Your Retail Business with Augmented Reality?
Stay Ahead of the Curve with Fingent
A mixture of in-person shopping experiences and tech-centric journeys will shape the future of retail.
While many modern consumers still like to make purchases at brick-and-mortar shops, 63% of all buying journeys start online. As such, your organization must embrace the latest retail industry technology trends to provide consumers with an experience that seamlessly transitions between channels and mediums.
To achieve such fluidity, you need a technology partner like Fingent that understands the thoroughly modern challenges retail businesses face.
Fingent provides end-to-end custom application development services for retailers. Our dynamic team can create tailor-made field sales applications, inventory management tools, omnichannel fulfillment solutions, and other digital technology resources you need to maintain your edge.
Connect with us today or submit a request for a proposal to learn more.
Digital transformation has become indispensable, more so now than ever before. When COVID-19 struck, governments swung into action and issued orders that restricted in-person business operations and encouraged people to work from home. In response, businesses began to look for ways to continue their operations by turning to various technologies.
Even before the spread of the pandemic, these technologies empowered businesses to engage with their customers, allowing workplace flexibility while introducing automation and faster processes. But the pandemic accelerated these adoptions immensely. The digital transformation helped businesses to find ways for people to communicate, collaborate, and complete work while working remotely. At the same time, it catered to the request of customers who preferred contactless or contact-limited operations as well.
Exploring and understanding the latest digital transformation trends and what parts of these transformations will likely be here to last will help you plan the best digital transformation strategy.
Read more: Prepare for the future of Digital Innovation with these 10 services from Fingent!
What Is Trending In Digital Transformation Now (2022) And What’s Going Cold?
If there is one takeaway all businesses can learn from this pandemic, it is to be adaptable. As the landscape reinvents itself and workplace culture trends shift suddenly, systems, processes, internal dynamics must pivot to stay competitive. It is crucial to adopt digital trends with the staying power to benefit your business. This makes it important to know all about the trend that will stay long-term versus ones that will go cold in this post-COVID ecosystem. Let’s begin with what goes cold.
1. Fading: Blockchain implementation
Blockchain implementation is designed to maintain distributed ledgers. However, the cost associated with it is higher compared to other technologies that can be applied more affordably. The higher pricing has diminished the interest in blockchain implementation.
2. Fading: Office technologies
Much of everyday business operations hinge on office technologies. Work from home mandates has changed this outdated means of communication and collaboration. Mobile phones have replaced pagers and online documentation has replaced paper.
3. Fading: Complicated and inadequate technology stacks
Whether your team is remote, hybrid, or office-based, it is crucial to have the right tech stack. A 2021 Work Report finding shows that 32% of workers quit a job because of inadequate technology and there is the other 49% who are likely to quit if the tech stack is hard to use. Employees do not want to waste large amounts of time searching for information across various platforms. This can also result in security breaches too as it puts sensitive data at risk. Opting for streamlined technology over-complicated technology can lead to maximum efficacy.
4. Trending: 5G will go mainstream
Businesses need reliable connectivity and more bandwidth to achieve greater success at their core parts such as remote work and videoconferencing. Increased reliance on phones, tablets, and other IoT devices highlights the need for the multi-lane superhighway and so 5G deployments have become a vital part of the solution.
Read more: Future proof your business with 5G, Edge Computing, and Cloud!
5. Trending: Customer Data Platforms
There has been an explosion of Customer Data Platform (CDP) last year. It is highly difficult to organize fragmented data from multiple sources. Organizing such data is also a costly affair. To address this challenge, most companies now rely on CDPs to help them collect, organize, tag, and make it usable for all those who need access to it. Data will continue to grow exponentially in the coming years which makes the rise of customer data platforms inevitable.
6. Consolidation of software vendors
Worldwide merger and acquisition activity combined with developing technologies has resulted in a consolidation of software vendors. According to a report by Gartner, consolidation in the tech business is set to hit a record high in 2022.
7. Digital transformation tools
Remote and hybrid work is becoming the rule, not an exception. With this scenario, organizations need technologies that seamlessly enable collaboration. Digital transformation tools will help businesses to manage employees and stakeholders that are globally dispersed. And this trend will become increasingly prominent in 2022.
8. Increased focus on the power of AI and hyper-automation
The gigantic amounts of data that businesses gather are only as effective as their AI systems. So, the implementation of AI will remain crucial for efficient business function in 2022. There is no need to approach AI with fear as AI will repurpose human assets as opposed to taking jobs away.
The key purpose of Artificial Intelligence is to automate. Essentially, this means all mundane and repetitive tasks can be automated resulting in huge benefits for many employees. Besides, it allows the employer to use that talent for more purposeful tasks.
9. AI for enhanced customer experience
According to Gartner, businesses that use AI in their customer service channels will experience a 25% increase in operational efficiency. The insights on customer behavior are causing IT system redesigns.
10. Technology to support distributed enterprises
The workforce is now becoming more geographically dispersed. Frictionless work experienced necessitates major technical and service changes. Every organization must reconfigure to embrace distributed services. The right digital technology is imperative for business success.
11. Supply chain digitization
Increased consumer prices and the sluggish economy are exerting tremendous pressure on supply chains. Supply chain digitization is a crucial component that will aid in solving supply chain issues.
Read more: A Look Into The Future Of Manufacturing Industry – The challenges, the opportunities, and the technologies that will help revolutionize!
12. Fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0)
Industry 4.0 includes new integrated technology that aims to mitigate the inefficiencies of traditional manufacturing. The manufacturing industries are moving towards robotics, AI, and ML to increase efficiency and benefit their customers.
13. Renewed focus on Human Capital Management (HCM) software
The practice of HCM has become increasingly prevalent in 2021. It has become the driving force for most business practices and will continue to center stage in 2022.
Planning The Best Digital Transformation Strategy With Fingent
The acceleration of digital transformation may seem overwhelming. But the right technology can enable a seamless transition for your business. Fingent can help collaborate and streamline the process of selecting solutions that drive digital transformation. Fingent custom software development experts will assist you in evaluating the available options in the market and in making the best choice on the solutions you need. We can help in reducing the cost of your tech evaluations, increase process effectiveness and employee satisfaction. So, the only tool you need to digitally transformation of your business is Fingent! Connect with us today!
How to plan a successful COVID-exit strategy and get your business on track?
If the 2008-09 global recession was due to financial meltdown and economic vulnerabilities, the 2020 economic crisis stemmed from the global pandemic and subsequent health emergency. Both incidents hold lessons that business owners and leaders should follow to fast-track their organizations’ recovery in 2021.
Read more: 11 Practices Followed by Leaders to Build Resilience and Ensure Rapid Business Recovery
Economic growth in 2021 is likely to improve compared to the growth rate in the second half of 2020. However, it will still be uneven. Additionally, the timing and growth will vary for different products and services and geographic markets.
Given the uncertain recovery of the economy, leaders and business owners need to plan a successful strategy to lead their teams and organizations over the year. The focus should be a forecast of their companies’ revenue potentially earned in every quarter of the year.
That said, the COVID-exit strategy is not straightforward. Leaders and business owners will have to make a few difficult choices.
- How much should my organization change, and how fast?
- How far should I go to change my current strategy and adopt faster and more agile approaches?
These are some of the questions that you’ll probably need to figure out. However, remember that if your organization does not move quickly, it will lose itself in the crowd.
One of the best ways to transform is to apply the “all-in” approach to transformation. It means to go ahead with full speed. Whether your organization’s transformation should be about portfolio moves or performance improvements misses the point. If you want to succeed, you must consider both and make your transformation go big. This approach will help your organization emerge stronger and sustain the competitive edge for a long time.
This article discusses how leaders can build a successful COVID-exit strategy and begin a holistic transformation.
Three fundamental steps that organizations can consider
If your organization is successfully managing portfolio and performance moves simultaneously in a transformation, you can invest in three foundational steps:
- Getting an honest view of the business’s full potential across both portfolio and performance moves.
- Understanding the impact of those moves.
- Creating a program with a proper structure and sequence to maximize value creation.
While understanding the full business potential, leaders must know the importance of setting a high aspiration. According to McKinsey & Company, companies that put their gross transformation targets at 75% of trailing earnings are more likely to create value sustainably.
Incrementalism may be risky for organizations trying to break out from the COVID-19 crisis. Management teams seek safety to confront the current situation and avoid the discomfort of going in for the big moves. In reality, leaders must use this time and opportunity to challenge assumptions and overcome social barriers that block bold moves.
Read more: Top 5 Organizational Imperatives for Business Leaders to Become Winners in the New Normal
Successful digital transformation requires leaders to answer these questions
- Which line(s) of business does my company no longer own naturally?
- Which trends accelerated by COVID-19 could transform my business?
- What are the new efficiencies and business models developed by my company to meet the COVID-19 necessities?
- How can my organization benefit from the advantages of those new efficiencies and business models in the next normal?
- How has my organization’s health changed, and what elements and capability building will be required to maximize the impact of the COVID-exit?
While you are trying to balance portfolio and performance moves, you will also need to consider the sequencing. Portfolio and performance initiatives must go hand-in-hand. You must consider each move by defining the magnitude, timing, and risk of impact.
Read more: Fingent Speaks: What it Takes to Build a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy
According to McKinsey & Co., stand-alone portfolio moves capture less than half of value creation, especially in areas such as deal premiums, performance upside, or growing new business. However, if your strategy is ill-conceived, even stand-alone performance moves can take time and maybe outweighed by acquiring the wrong business lines.
Two cases of “all-in transformation”
While you must consider both portfolio moves and performance improvements, which of these should you execute first? The answer depends on the organization and context.
How and when you implement your transformation elements must be guided by your organization’s various circumstances and potential at any given time.
We’re listing two cases of “all-in transformation” here. Both the examples highlight the significance of sequenced transformation in unlocking business value. In both cases, the organizations identified the required potentials, set high aspirations, and deliberately sequenced the portfolio and performance moves to achieve the results. However, the companies differed in how they advanced from there.
First case:
In the first case, the value creation and its sequencing were as follows:
- The company streamlined its cost structure, focused on resource allocation, and carved out a few of its competing lines after consolidating business units and simplifying the executive team. This reorganization enabled about 10% of total transformation value creation.
- Next, the company improved the effectiveness of its sales force which generated high revenue growth. It also implemented automation and simplifications to reduce overheads and adopted a strategic procurement approach to reduce external expenditure. These operational improvements enabled about 75% of transformation value creation.
- Lastly, the company invested in optimizing firms it had acquired and integrated a similar set of core capabilities.
Second case:
The second case, though an all-in transformation program, took a separate route.
- After a significant merger, the company re-evaluated its core business portfolio and divested non-core business. This approach enabled the organization to focus on financial flexibility by using the proceeds to buy back stock. Overall, this performance move allowed the company about 75% of value creation.
- By streamlining its operations, focusing on revenue growth and margin improvements, the company’s performance transformation enabled about 25% of value creation.
Read more: 7 Ways for Your Business to Overcome the COVID-19 Aftermath
From these examples, leaders need to understand that they cannot choose between a portfolio-first or performance-first approach while planning their exit strategy. The order is not important, but leaders will have to accept that they are going all in, set high aspirations right from the start, and let the realization of full potential determine what happens. Avoiding an ad hoc approach to value creation may have significant implications over the long-term. Research reveals that organizations that go for the “all-in” transformation approach are more likely to show lasting improvements and are nearly three times more likely to be ahead of their competitors.
The takeaway
After a year of uncertainties, CEOs and business leaders are aware that the COVID-exit path will not be easy. However, if companies adopt an all-in transformation approach, they can expect more dynamism and flexibility during the journey.
Read more: 10 Services Offered by Fingent to Prepare Your Business for the Future of Digital Innovation
At top software development company Fingent, we use cutting-edge digital solutions and rapid innovation to help businesses reinvent the future. We’re closely monitoring the situation and helping businesses return to work with our technology consulting and innovation capabilities. Feel free to get in touch with us to know how we can transform your business digitally.
Digital business transformation: Why Digital Strategy for Business is a Must Today?
- What is digital transformation?
- What is digital disruption?
- Causes of disruption and digital transformation
- Why should businesses leverage digital transformation?
- How to start your digital transformation journey?
- Digital transformation trends to embrace in 2023 and beyond
- Conclusion
What is digital transformation?
Digital transformation is the process of integrating digital technologies to create a new business model or modify existing business processes to meet changing business requirements. Digital business transformation is also a cultural change that enables an organization to challenge the status quo, experiment, and accept failure as well.
While digital transformation may involve many technologies, the hottest topics currently are cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Many companies have already started to transform digitally and by 2023, it is estimated that such organizations will contribute to more than half of global GDP.
According to research published by IDC, despite the COVID-19 outbreak, the global spending on digital transformation technologies and services is slated to grow from 10.4% in 2020 to $1.3 trillion. In fact, the pandemic has compelled businesses to increase operational efficiency and improve customer experience. Both of these aspects are not just major goals of the digital transformation of business but also deciding factors that influence a company’s fate during an economic slowdown.
In general, digital transformation is not just about disruption or technology and not even about transforming for a digital age. In this guide, we help you understand the essence of digital transformation for business and why you should implement it.
What is digital disruption?
In simple terms, digital disruption is nothing but transformation due to emerging digital technologies and business models. This can cause a significant change in customer behavior and market context, requiring the need for re-evaluation.
Consider these examples of digital disruption:
- The film photography and photo processing industry underwent digital disruption with the arrival of digital cameras.
- The traditional services like taxis and food delivery were disrupted by Uber that pioneered on-demand services.
- Companies like Netflix and Amazon caused disruption to the subscription-based economy model by transforming how content is accessed by people and monetized by advertisers.
Both digital disruption and digital transformation present immense opportunities for businesses to gain a competitive advantage.
Causes of disruption and digital transformation
1. Technological innovations
Digital business transformation is more impactful than ever before. Again, it is important to remember that neither does technology drive disruption nor does it cause transformation. It depends on how digital technology in business is used and adopted by partners, customers, competitors, and stakeholders. These technologies primarily include Artificial Intelligence, IoT, virtual and augmented reality, edge computing, and blockchain.
2. Customer behavior
The demand for customers’ convenience and simplicity in dealing with businesses is not a new concept. It existed even before the internet era. It will not be wrong to add that transformation is simply catching up. Customer behavior and needs are also affected by disruptions at the societal level.
3. Innovations and inventions
Be it science, technology, business or even non-technological context, innovations and inventions can be disruptive. For instance, the invention of the locomotive and the printing press led to drastic changes in our society in the past centuries. Today, we’re experiencing the biggest transformation in every sphere of life with the invention of smartphones, social media, software applications, and so on.
4. Ecosystem
Organizations are part of business as well as natural ecosystems. So, any economical changes, evolutions towards collaborations, regulatory changes, and even a pandemic can impact and drive the need for digital transformation. Most of the organizations that were either postponing or canceling their plans to switch to cloud-based infrastructure have now started migrating their legacy systems to cloud increasingly since the COVID-19 onslaught.
Why should businesses leverage digital transformation?
Businesses must focus on digital transformation to steer themselves towards growth, stay ahead of the competition, and make themselves ready for the future.
Undergoing digital transformation helps your business gain the following advantages:
1. On-demand services
Never have we seen these many businesses demanding more agile hybrid IT services and agile networking capabilities to provide a better user experience. This is not limited to just the usability of applications for employees or customers, it includes the experience of working with the IT team and tools as well.
2. Improves productivity
Digital technology enables employees to become more effective in their primary roles.
Digital transformation helps core business functions such as HR and finance to automate crucial areas such as payroll, enabling leaders to focus on more productive opportunities.
It also enables remote working and provides access to technology and services on demand, which is important to create an environment that helps employees to be efficient.
3. Security
Data security is one of the biggest concerns of many IT leaders. While this is a highly complicated task requiring stringent enforcement around access, data compliance, and protection from attacks, it is useless if network forces have to go elsewhere for faster speeds and flexibility.
So, businesses must surround themselves with technology partners as well as cybersecurity experts that understand the business objective and can operate honestly and transparently to achieve those objectives.
Read more: How IT-as-a-Service Boosts the Digital Transformation of Enterprises
4. Strengthen business partnerships
Demands of customers are changing more than ever before and so is the competition within industries. Most companies are relying on each other, working with suppliers and distributors, contractors, and specialized consultants to produce a myriad range of products and services to attract customers.
Though these partners can be managed via document-based communication, it is an exhausting obstacle to efficiency. However, technology can be used to streamline and redesign the process and make it more transparent, accurate, and timely.
With the digital process set at an early stage, businesses can stay ahead of the competition and make themselves available to future partners. Internal processes can be streamlined and over time, digital transformation for small businesses can produce tools to generate time and resource gains that will help strengthen business partnerships.
Read more: InfinCE – Digital Transformation for Today’s Small Business
5. Informed decision making
Most organizations have access to greater volumes of data today. This data can be converted to valuable business insights and used to make more informed and faster decisions.
The famous American food brand McCormick & Company’s “FlavorPrint” is a smart platform that allows consumers to discover personalized recipes and receive product recommendations. This use case shows how digital transformation helps McCormick to make informed decisions driven by data. Through personalization and added insights, the FlavorPrint program helps meet consumer needs with an enhanced and relevant food experience.
Leveraging AI-based technologies, analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT) can support leaders in their endeavors to make quicker and better decisions resulting in progression.
How to start your digital transformation journey?
A few steps to set off your digital transformation journey:
1. Determine what digital transformation means to your business
First, identify all the challenges your business is facing and then figure out the likely digital solutions that will help you achieve your business goals.
Read more: 5 Questions that Define Your Digital Transformation
2. Define a digital strategy for your business
Once you have identified the challenges your business faces, the next step is to evaluate the various digital transformation solutions that you can consider for your case. For instance, it could be front-end transformation such as products and customer experiences, or back-end transformation such as cloud and IT.
3. Give importance to executive buy-in
Make sure to obtain executive buy-in within your company after you have defined a digital strategy for your business. Executive buy-in is one of the most reliable signs of your company’s commitment to digital transformation.
4. Identify partners for your digital transformation journey
Partners or stakeholders are critical to your digital transformation success. A reliable and strong partner can support your journey by:
- Delivering capabilities to help you transform
- Offering consulting services to help integrate digital technology
- Assisting you to navigate the digital transformation landscape
- Sharing successful approaches and practices
5. Communicate your plan to your employees
To gain the trust of your employees and obtain intrinsic buy-in, you must ensure to communicate the value of digital transformation to your employees. Make sure to provide your employees with a clear structure and plan, and train them adequately to prepare them for the digital transformation.
6. Execute your digital transformation
Start executing your digital transformation plan at all levels of your organization that is, from the top-level leadership to your employees. It is important to remain committed throughout the journey to ensure successful digital transformation. Setting your sights on the end vision and working towards future business success and growth will help you deliver a more unified experience to your customers as well.
Digital transformation trends to embrace in 2023 and beyond
IT leaders should be prepared for DX-centric shifts in the IT service provider sector. They should get ready to embrace Artificial Intelligence and insight-driven innovation and explore the benefits of public cloud adoption. Here are a few trends that digital transformation companies must consider:
1. Digital operating models
CIOs need to adapt and include integrated cross-functional teams to lead the culture change within the organizations and create the digital backbone having the capacity to power the transformation.
2. Big data
The increasing volume, variety, and velocity of data can be overwhelming. Storing massive amounts of data is also a challenge. While cheap storage makes data collection easier, it is not recommended. Also, new regulations such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) demand more careful data management. So, proper planning and management of data streams is a must as it can result in significant data privacy and compliance risk.
3. Leverage AI
Artificial Intelligence will have to take center-stage and deliver business outcomes with digital transformation. From sales, marketing to HR and Finance, AI will permeate all functions.
IT leaders should consider leveraging advanced machine-learning algorithms by incorporating them into their outcome-driven data analytics strategy. This will help them churn the data extensively and garner valuable insights. Both AI and machine learning can be leveraged to automate and mitigate the data governance problem.
4. Merger and Acquisition
The IT outsourcing industry has increased the merger and acquisition activity as traditional IT service providers are acquiring digital marketing and engineering companies to offer new services to their clients.
Experts believe that acquisitions will transform the landscape for CIOs and the service providers they collaborate with. It will also be a source of disruption for CIOs as they will have to identify the potential and integrate digital capabilities into their product lines.
5. New allies
The digital transformation era will see vendors teaming up on marketing and improving branded spaces within their design studios and innovation hubs. According to some analysts at Technology Business Research Inc, some consultancies may even have to become ‘frenemies’ and create partnerships where each party uses its strength and provides depth in the domain to deliver expertise.
Read more: Fingent Speaks: What it Takes to Build a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy
Conclusion
A digitally transformed workplace can revolutionize any business. So, it is crucial to adopt digital technologies and experiment using social media, big data analytics, cloud computing, and mobility. You may hire digital transformation services companies for your digital business transformation.
Read more: Prepare for the Future of Digital Innovation with these 10 Services From Fingent
At Fingent, we provide digital technology solutions and services for complex business problems across many industries such as retail, healthcare, finance, education, and more. Our comprehensive apps, platforms, analytics, and solutions expertise have helped us assist companies in their digital transformation journey. Connect with us to learn more.
Challenges Your Business Should Overcome in the Post-COVID Phase
- Introduction
- Challenges in Reopening Strategy
- Challenges of Shifting Customer Habits
- Challenge of Operations and Employee Safety
- Impact on Operations for Manufacturing Units
- Challenges of Finance and Banking
- Tax, Trade & Regulatory Challenges
- Crisis Management
- Focus on tomorrow
Introduction
The past few months have been an extremely challenging time for communities across the globe as the pandemic continues to take its toll. Amidst all the chaos and anxiety however, the world is trying to return to the new normal. During this unprecedented reality, businesses are witnessing the beginning of a dramatic restructuring of economic and social order. Everyone is looking forward to the next normal that will materialize after the battle against COVID-19 has been won, with hopes that it will be better and more profitable. Challenges lie ahead though. What are these COVID-19 Aftermath challenges and how do we combat them? This article will discuss that.
Where Do We Start?
With lives and livelihoods in danger, businesses are running a spreadsheet for basics that never mattered so much before. Plans are being drawn how many people can fit into a workplace spaced six feet apart, where the one-way path should begin and end, and what adjustments can and need to be made to the entrance, lunchrooms, and restrooms.
All of these are critical tasks but chalking them down is not going to be enough to mobilize and stabilize businesses. We need an enterprise-wide ability to absorb uncertainty while incorporating lessons into operating models quickly. This might seem like a daunting path beset with challenges, but an action plan can get you through this successfully. This article discusses 7 major challenges and resolutions to jumpstart the recovery.
Read more: 6 Hot Technologies that Handhold Businesses Amid COVID-19 Impact
1. Challenges in Reopening Strategy
The pandemic has impacted nearly every industry including retail. Manufacturing is on a downward slope as production moves at a snail’s pace. Supply chains are being disrupted due to higher air freight costs. This supply shock is having a knock-on effect on retail. Navigating their way out of this spiral is going to need a solid reopening strategy.
Read more: Contact-less Services: The New Normal in Retail
What can businesses do?
- Restart and reset, not just reopen: Employee and customer behaviors have drastically changed. Be ready to start a new era of business. Build courage and foresight to change for more than just immediate needs.
- Be ready to adopt omnichannel integration: Omnichannel initiatives offer contactless curbside pickup and other features, so be willing to continuously improve services.
- Shape your future workforce: Redeploy store associates to fill other roles. Upskill then to achieve the required digital fluency. Cross-train employees so that they can fill in when others are away.
- Act swiftly to radically accelerate in-store integration: Customers may not be inclined to visit stores unless you give them a good reason to do so. Offer your consumers compelling value propositions for store traffic.
- Develop a future-state vision: Adopt an omnichannel view that includes store closure plans or rent negotiations.
- Digitize and automate non-core tasks: Automate labor scheduling. Expand the use of self-checkout and mobile checkout processes. Provide remote-management tools for in-house and field managers.
- Shift tasks: Sourcing and distribution teams must find ways to move certain tasks, such as price tagging and labeling, away from stores.
2. Challenges of Shifting Customer Habits
As the coronavirus spread progressed across geographies, customer behavior has also changed drastically. Customer habits are changing, and we can expect them to continue to change in the weeks and months ahead. We can break down their behavior into three phases where each phase shows a distinct behavior:
- Escalation: Customers tend to load up on essential goods such as groceries and medicines which include immunity-boosters.
- Accumulation: Customers brace for a sustained quarantine by stocking up on everyday personal care products.
- Recovery: Customers will continue to spend on consumer goods.
Also, customers now prefer making purchases online, their focus has shifted more to eCommerce.
Read more: Re-Imagining Customer Experience in Retail Industry
How can businesses respond?
- Enable flexible product flow: Ensure your product inventories align with consumer demand. Make distribution centers more flexible. As more customers purchase products online, make sure you minimize distribution disruptions.
- Bolster online presence: Accelerate direct-to-customer sales.
- Maintain close contact with customers: Ensure they know that products are available.
3. Challenge of Operations and Employee Safety
One of the main concerns of a company leader during and after the COVID-19 pandemic is its impact on operations. Evidently, the epidemic has adversely affected sales volume and the ability to serve clients and customers as well as manage the business. Companies are faced with the challenge of employees being quarantined for weeks after business or vacation trips. They lack the tools required to organize remote work during the quarantine.
How to reorganize the workplace?
- Establish dedicated cross-functional teams: They can coordinate the activities between various business units, provide necessary information to the management team, and communicate with employees, partners, and employees.
- Analyze critical roles and key positions: Develop an effective process for managing decision-making under various scenarios.
- Ensure the safety of employees: Review policies for maintaining good hygiene at the workplace.
- Ensure that there is no crowding in the office: Decide on which roles can be done remotely and which roles require employees to be present in the office. This will help you optimize the work with only 20-30% of employees at the office.
- Easy Transportation: Ensure that transportation is arranged for and accessible by the employees.
- Plans for support staff: Have a written plan on how to stagger the arrival of support staff such as receptionists and security guards.
- Workout checkpoints: Have a series of checkpoints where testing can be done.
4. Impact on Operations for Manufacturing Units
Manufacturers face formidable challenges when it comes to restarting their operations. Globally, they are facing workforce disruptions at an unprecedented scale. Most manufacturers are yet to determine how they will function and perform while struggling to cope with the present scenario. They need fit-for-purpose plans.
How can manufacturers respond?
- Start with possible scenarios: Start with the current need for workforce and design a workforce approach.
- Tap into technology: Consider the possibility of automating certain aspects of the industry which would avoid too many people at the site.
- Create a roster: Ensure that teams come in at different times during the day depending on the number of workers and the skill required at any given point.
- Focus on a safe work environment: Organize regular cleaning and disinfection of workplaces and tools. Invest in medical equipment such as thermometers and sanitizers.
- Review sick leave policies: Consider the possibility of providing temporary sick leave without the need to provide a doctor’s notice.
- Develop agile workforce strategies: It keeps the global economy viable.
- Create your own news channel: Misinformation can create particular challenges for manufacturers. Combat this by ensuring that you put out timely, accurate, and appropriate information for your workers.
5. Challenges of Finance and Banking
Economic uncertainty and risk have either directly or indirectly impacted most finance companies. As businesses slow down, companies are seeing lower revenue due to reduced cash flow.
Managing cash and liquidity positions may become crucial in the coming months. This situation is worsened by inadequate digital maturity, staff shortages and immense pressure on the existing infrastructure as companies deal with the impact of the pandemic. You need strategies to safeguard your customers’ financial security while you safeguard their wellbeing and yours as well.
What can finance services do?
- Craft a strategic response: Adopting the right digital technologies enables innovations. These must include solutions for analytics and insights to detect and prepare for new risks.
- Enable Automation: Ensure availability of digital banking services through business process reengineering and automation.
- Leverage AI capabilities: There has been and will be a surge in call volumes during and after COVID-19. Leverage AI-backed tools and conversation platforms to deal with the surge.
- Initiate video banking: Live web video banking solutions can assist your team in serving customers and maintaining business continuity.
6. Tax, Trade & Regulatory Challenges
There are significant tax provisions and other measures to assist businesses that stakeholders should carefully review. Post pandemic, they should think about the broader implications of their business decisions and strategies.
What can you do?
- Business disruption: Develop restructuring plans. Review intra-group service expenses and expense allocations.
- Cash tax savings: Manage cash taxes by potentially reducing taxable income. Obtain available refunds. Work with the treasury function to align repatriation strategies. Model taxable income against the company’s overall tax posture.
- Agile tax models: Supply chains and business strategies need reevaluation, which is best achieved by agile tax models.
- Review all aspects: Stabilize supply chains. Brace for an unpredictable revenue. Reduce costs and increase productivity.
- Meet regulatory obligations: Despite budget constraints, tax compliance requirements must be met. Consider co-sourcing or outsourcing tax compliance.
- Stay informed: Understand the expense of various supply chain configurations and opportunities. Make informed decisions quickly.
7. Crisis Management
Your response to the crisis today can position your business to thrive tomorrow. You need to prioritize incident management along with the safety of workers. It is important for organizations to understand what data is relevant to their business. Some companies are developing new contingency plans while others are using existing ones.
What can organizations do?
- Dedicate a team for crisis management: Ensure that every team member knows what their role is. Train each team member in executing the plan to be sure that they are ready at any moment.
- Establish facts: Strong data reinforces a central element of crisis planning. Establish facts accurately during the crisis. Use the facts to inform your response strategy.
- Collaborate: Collaborate with the public relations team, legal and regulatory teams, and operational and response teams. Create a small core committee from among them.
Focus on tomorrow
The response window for any crisis is measured in months but recovery is measured in years. Create scenarios today to plan for a stronger tomorrow and beyond. Wider and longer-term perspectives can help your business emerge stronger and more sustainable. Data, Readiness, and Empathy are the three vital qualities required to keep people healthy and businesses running. Fingent top custom software development company is closely monitoring the situation and helping businesses return to work with our technology consulting and innovation capabilities. Contact us to know more.
The Need for Digitalization
Digital technologies have penetrated into every aspect of our lives, transforming the way we seek and receive information. For instance, today, we search for products and services on search engines rather than in yellow page directories and other offline media. We communicate our experiences with other people through chats, email, blogs, or social media posts. In other words, the media we use, the content we consume and share, the customers we engage with – all benefit from digitalization and digitized data.
Read More: A Road Map To Digital Transformation in 2020
Why is digitalization inevitable for businesses and how can organizations benefit from it?
Before we discuss the advantages of digitalization, we need to understand the difference between digitization and digitalization. According to Gartner’s IT Glossary, “digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities, whereas “digitization is the process of changing from analog to digital form.”
Digitalization is already influencing the way we do business
Digitalization already has had an impact on our business – from the way we acquire and retain customers to the way we present our business and manage our reputation. While in the past, brick-and-mortar stores were sufficient to establish your business, now consumers want to know what services or products you offer before deciding to make the purchase.
Today, businesses have to be in close proximity with their customers to find out about their opinions and improve customer experiences. When you know more about your customers, you have more data at hand. Digitalization helps apply this data to make better business decisions.
With digital technologies, you have more tools that make work easier. This can lead to increased productivity and reduced costs. Digital tools such as dashboards and collaboration tools such as messengers and video chats help align your employees with business goals and improve internal communication.
What does digitalization mean to you?
Digitalization does not just mean implementing various technologies into daily business. You need to also rethink your business and operating models to implement the technology. Technology is just the tip of the iceberg. Together with it, you need to understand your digital maturity as an organization. Technology does enable digital engagement, but you need to assess the big picture of what digitalization means to your business – whether you are a public organization, a small private company or a global player. To gain control over customer relationships, you need to develop end-to-end strategies to reach customers.
Top 3 opportunities for digitalization
1. Converting excel sheets to dashboards
In any organization, we find an opportunity gap between the growth of the company on a revenue basis and the growth of the support staff. This part of the company needs to focus on improving automation and scalability to better support the rest of the company.
Read More: How Automation Ensures Businesses Stay Afloat During COVID-19 Crisis
Most of us still enter information in excel spreadsheets. For example, if we track our projects (work in progress), contracts, savings, etc. in separate spreadsheets, we’re only entering the same data many times. Converting to dashboards can help you quickly view and analyze your entire data in one place.
Along with consolidated views, dashboards provide opportunities for business intelligence by allowing users to display only what’s required through the use of filters. Once you start adding insights and recommended actions along with the summary, the dashboard becomes more useful by closing any communication gaps between various departments in your company. In short, you save time, provide clear communication, and drive business goals.
2. Document Management systems
The advent of digitalization has opened up new avenues of data, making its’ management complex. The traditional file and paper methods have become archaic as well as cumbersome. Document management systems have proved themselves indispensable for businesses of all sizes.
With digitalization dominating the trend in business, enterprises are looking for new ways to streamline documentation by using various automation techniques. The rise of cloud-based document management systems has simplified the creation and sharing of digital documents for enterprises.
Read More: Top 6 Reasons Why You Should Move to a Cloud-Hosted ERP
Managing huge volumes of data has also become relatively easy. Today you have document management systems that vary in scope from simple systems that cater to small enterprises to more sophisticated ones that cater to large global enterprises. Document management systems reduce physical storage, enable quick access of documents, promote security, make maintenance and customization easy, and reduce monotonous tasks.
3. OCR Technology
Another technology that helps with the digitalization of businesses is OCR. The ability of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to automatically extract data from an image file or scanned document has helped businesses to streamline their operations. It reduces the time required in manual data entry and extraction. A robust and accurate OCR can extract data from multiple document formats. Thus, it saves time in data collection, reduces human effort, and aligns business processes with customer needs. AI-powered OCR eliminates manual entry, thereby reducing errors and improving productivity. Businesses that are equipped with AI-powered OCR technology can stay afloat in the digital wave that has swept across the world.
Digitalization can drive recovery from COVID-19
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to take a toll on people’s lives, it has also stimulated change in the social, personal, economic, and corporate forefronts. The focus has now shifted from growth, business development, and digitalization to just riding out the storm, that is, ensuring business continuity. However, organizations should not lose sight of the long-term effects of the crisis. Companies would have to rethink their business models according to changing customer demands. This crisis has forced organizations to invest in their digitalization strategies to establish sustainability.
Read More: Business Process Re-engineering: Facing Crisis with Confidence
Companies need to direct their digitalization strategies towards increasing resilience and optimization. Rather than just focusing on increasing productivity, a sustainable and comprehensive digitalization strategy should focus on maintaining productivity during future challenges. Write to us to know more.
What considerations should be part of a company’s digital transformation strategy?
Smart business leaders are waking up to the fact that they need to get digital transformation “right” for their very survival. The widespread adoption of technology, rapidly changing consumer behavior, and innovation-triggered disruptions are making digital transformation a must-have for businesses.
In a recent survey by Gartner, 87% of senior business leaders responded that digitalization is a company priority and 79% of corporate strategists said that digital innovation is crucial for reinventing their businesses.
It’s clear that organizations have started thinking about digital innovation. What they need to know next is the best approach to start, lead change, and transform.
In this interview, our Senior Vice President – Process and Technology, Deepu Prakash shares his expert opinion by answering these questions:
- How do you define digital transformation?
- What does digital transformation mean to your company?
- How can a brand identify what digital transformation should mean to them?
How do you define digital transformation?
Digital transformation is the strategic, deliberate, and sustained application of modern digital technologies to deliver highly unique customer value propositions, by making fundamental changes to how a business operates.
Can you explain what digital transformation means to your company?
I look after the process and technology practice at Fingent. To us, digital innovation broadly means three things.
1. Strategic shifts
Our focus has shifted from developing products to developing platforms, both for us and for our customers. We are moving away from a value chain-based model towards managing the entire ecosystem that impacts our customer base. Today, we are on the constant lookout for partnerships that can help us provide a competitive difference to our customer base. We expect cross-industry consolidation in the near future.
Related Reading: Why Business Leaders Must Embrace Digital Adoption
2. Developing operational agility through digitally-enabled processes
We are using digital technology to cut across organizational and departmental silos to provide a better Customer Experience. This results in increased cross-department and cross-organization project management, collaboration, and integration. We are reorganizing our processes to enable experimentation and evidence-based scaling.
From a technology perspective: DevOps practices, APIs, and Unified Identity management are being rolled out across the organization. We are setting up practices to actively leverage third-party developer innovation, to reduce the time-to-market for us and our customers. In fact, one of our products INFINCE is empowering small businesses to achieve digital agility without the need to own infrastructure or an IT practice.
3. Culture and competence:
Despite being a young technology company, we have to work hard to develop the mindset needed to adapt to the massive technology shifts, across all departments. While training helps, it takes continuous coaching and mentoring to help deal with the culture shock that such transformation brings in. Roles and job descriptions may not be so clearly defined as it used to be before. Hence, there is less certainty around outcomes and an increased need for greater transparency than what we had previously.
The ability to exert influence without direct authority is a critical skill for career growth.
How other brands can identify what digital transformation should mean to them?
- Successful digital transformation is less about technology and more about leadership. Hire the right leadership talent to create a digital transformation strategy that would work for your customers and your people.
- Start by deeply re-examining your core business through your customers’ eyes. Ask yourself whether your business will continue to stay competitive or will it be sustainable going forward.
- Map out the entire set of customer journeys. Include customer interactions with your allied products and services. Map modern digital technologies to all these journeys. Identify new channels, new opportunities, and see how you can reach out through all these channels.
- Analyze your state of competition not just with the established players, but also with the startups in your industry segment and adjacent segments, especially with a view to identifying the relevant technologies, platforms, and vendors.
Related Reading: 4 Questions to Ask When Your Business Goes Digital
Need help with your digital transformation goals?
Fingent’s team is highly experienced in helping businesses solve their digital transformation challenges.
We have partnered with businesses worldwide in their digital transformation projects.
We can help you define your vision and create robust digital transformation plans that enable your business to transform and grow. To take advantage and get the ball rolling, please get in touch with Fingent top custom software development company.
Digital transformation has turned into a ubiquitous concept that businesses can no longer afford to look away. The world is going digital at a lightning speed, making it imperative for business establishments to upgrade their skills, processes and technological know-how to this changing model. The fact that digital transformation emerged as a top concern for CIO Agenda in 2017, according to Wall Street Journal report underlines the imminence of the situation.
Leveraging digital technologies to improve business operations and organizational setups is the focus of businesses right now. If you too are considering a digital transformation initiative for your business, here are five questions to consider for making desired progress in a prioritized and strategic way:
1. Why do you need digital transformation?
‘Just because everyone is doing it’ is not the best reason to undertake a digital transformation process. It is important for an organization to understand why, if at all, they need to go through it. The best approach here is to identify the end goals you want to achieve by going digital – whether it is improving product quality, customer experiences or internal processes – and then work backward. This is particularly important for businesses, where digital processes do not directly tune in with core KPIs. Having your end goals in sight right from the onset will help you determine the outcomes of your digital transformation initiative.
2. How will you substantiate the value of your digital transformation initiative?
Well, this is one of the basic questions that must govern almost every business decision you take but is especially crucial in the case of digital transformation. You must have a clear idea as to how you plan to measure the success of your digitization plan, and for that, knowing how the concept fits into your business strategy is of paramount importance. Once these parameters have been established, the process of monitoring and gauging value of other relevant indicators, not just during the process of digital transformation but also beyond, becomes simpler. This will also save you time, effort and money in layering on technology in areas that don’t really require it.
3. Are your key stakeholders on board?
Digital transformation isn’t a small project but an extensive overhaul that will impact every single department and person associated with your business. As with every other big project, unexpected difficulties may crop up along the way. The project may get delayed or the budget may overshoot. If all your stakeholders aren’t onboard or fully convinced about the need to go digital, they may decide to pull the plug on the project. Working on your buy-in is essential to make sure all leaders and stakeholders – business partners, financiers, and shareholders – fully understand the importance of such an initiative and are committed to taking it to its logical end.
4. Have you found the right people to execute your digital transformation?
Whether you are simply revamping a website, building a new one, working on automated marketing, digitizing customer experiences, or doing it all in one go, you need the right kind of experts to get the job done and done well. Which brings up another poignant question – whether you want to hire people to do this job for you or outsource? The answer to this depends entirely on the kind of digitization you have in mind and the resources available at your disposal. If you are an established business with a long-term digital map in mind, building a core team of digital professionals is better suited. On the other hand, if you are a startup with limited resources, outsourcing may be a more practical option. Whatever your choice, you need to focus on striking that intricate balance between experience, skill and in-demand roles. There are a lot of talented professionals in the marketplace, you just need to pick the ones whose wavelength resonates with your end goals and larger KPIs.
5. Are your employees prepared for the change?
When a business undergoes a digital transformation, a lot of operational aspects are bound to change. This may mean that your employees will need to upgrade their skills and learn new processes. You cannot expect them to throw their existing work habits right out of the window and embrace the change instantaneously. A digital transformation will kick-in in the true sense only when you evolve a strategy to inform, educate and help your employees cope with the change.
Just the way every business has its own distinct identity, each digital transformation initiative is unique too. Be that as it may, these five key questions can prove vital in helping you define and execute a digital transformation that works best for your organization.
Businesses have encountered several technology waves, starting with the mainframe revolution in the 1960s to the decentralized computing wave of the 1970s, and from the advent of PCs in the 1980s to the rise of client servers in the 90s. The cloud and mobility represent the latest evolution of technology.
Such digital disruption is now a fact of life for almost all businesses. Enterprises no longer confront a question of “if,” but rather concern themselves with the “when” and “how” of digital transformation. A recent KPMG and Harvey Nash survey reveals 62% of IT professionals opine their business was already being disrupted or would be disrupted within the next two years. However, only 27% of respondents confined the presence of an enterprise-wide digital strategy.
Digital disruption is much more than co-opting new technology to the business. Businesses need to create entirely new competencies and co-opt it to incumbent legacy cultures and operating models. Here are four major questions to ask, to smooth the transformation process. These four questions also constitute a basic checklist for the digital transformation process.
1. What are the objectives of the Digital Transformation?
Embarking on a digital transformation journey is doomed to fail unless the enterprise has the end in mind, and defines a coherent strategy upfront. Implementing new technologies for the sake of it, or just because everyone else is doing so, is an exercise in futility, and may end up counterproductive by disrupting the well-entrenched ecosystem with nothing to gain in return.
Have a clear idea of the processes where digital transformation is to set in, and how the transformation would improve the process, add value, and how the intervention would make the lives of the stakeholders, from employees to customers, and from managers to owner better.
Some of the processes where digital intervention can automate the process, or make the process seamless and more accurate include form modeling, document integration, report generation, role-based accessibility and user assignment and reassignment, email notifications, task prioritization, and more. However, the possibilities are endless, limited only by imagination.
2. How much Customization will be required?
Most businesses face an issue of integration when they indulge in digital transformation, especially when the transformation involves multiple pieces of commercial software. Off the shelf software, for any function, be it operations, HR, Finance, data analytics, CRM, or any other function, will never suit enterprises perfectly. Seamless workflows will require customization as a rule.
Successful digital transformation takes place when the enterprise knows the extent of customization required. They audit the existing state, have a clear-cut idea of the desired state, have a roadmap to transform from the existing to the desired state, and map the software to the journey, to make sure the software works for the business.
A related consideration is the time-frame for the migration. A Successful digital transformation process progresses as per a predefined time frame, making sure the change does not disrupt business operations. A related challenge is slow down of operations when the new digital systems set in, owing to the learning curve. A well thought out digital transformation process factors in the delays associated with the learning curve, and pre-empt contingencies which may cause the business to screech to a grinding halt when the new software goes down to a bug.
3. How to Quantify the Value of the Digital Transformation Initiative?
Today’s businesses are driven by profits or returns on investment. The top management or owners support all change initiatives, including digital transformation initiatives based on the value it creates to the enterprise.
At the internal front, digital transformation generally makes internal processes seamless, increasing productivity and efficiency. At the customer facing end, digital transformation makes things easier for the customer, unlocks new possibilities, enable customers to buy or contact support in a much better way, and offers flexibility. However, even when the value created by the digital transformation is obvious, it still has to be quantified and made explicit. The harbingers of change need to not only know about the technologies to implement but also how to measure the value created by such initiatives. The end goal of digital transformation is to boost revenue, profitability, and investor value. Some of the factors which can be measured to link the digital transformation to such ends include inventory, human capital productivity, asset utilization, and other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Tracking some intermediate indicators, such as sentiment and engagement is also handy.
Today, several tools make quantification easy. Nucleus Research estimates every dollar spent on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system implementation returning a whopping $8.71. Forrester’s Total Economic Impact (TEI) tool enables enterprises to quantify the potential benefits enterprises gain by implementing a stack of technologies that communicate and work together, integrated by a framework of operational transformation methodologies.
4. How to Orchestrate the Change Initiative?
Regardless of whether the initiative is a digital upgrade or digital transformation, it is essentially a change process, and change requires strong leadership.
Implementing the digital transformation requires a well-defined team with a narrow scope and a cross-functional mandate. The harbingers of digital transformation need to make a tough call on the team.
Many of the team will resist change, accustomed as they are what they have always been doing. The digital transformation initiative requires clear cut consideration on how to implement change in the least disruptive way, and chalk out strategies on how to overcome resistance to change. Training the rank and file for familiarity to the new digital processes, and factoring in a learning curve are the basic requirements, but there is also a need for clear-cut communication on why the digital transformation initiative is being carried out, and the benefits it will bring about. Most often, the digital transformation initiative will be inevitable to keep pace in the highly digitally charged world, and for the firm to stay competitive. Today’s tech-savvy customers also demand heavy digital initiatives to be satisfied.
Estimates of digital transformation failures range from 66% to 84%. It requires a method to preempt the process from descending into madness. Roping in a sound tech development partner, competent in the digital technologies you want to adopt, and backed up by the resources and talent to implement a cutting edge digital solution, is the best way to embark on a digital transformation initiative.