Tag: digital transformation questions
Answering the Critical Questions Asked by Business Leaders Today on Digital Transformation!
Digital transformation is pervasive. It is hard but absolutely crucial. Enterprises need to transform their traditional business or risk sure failure. As new players emerge and disrupt established businesses, you will need a fundamental transformation of your core processes to remain competitive.
This may come with its share of worries though. Some of these dilemmas are obvious and quite common. They can be categorized into five major sections: productivity dilemma, value dilemma, ethical dilemma, leadership dilemma, and the human dilemma.
The right approach to these dilemmas is not taking absolute positioning with one of the concepts. Instead, a combination of the two concepts will bring the most value to your business and your clients.
This compromise or combination is not a one size fits all solution. Each organization must figure out where the right compromise is for its business. Wherever you position yourself between the concepts, know that it will have a significant impact on your business.
Given the high stakes involved, digital transformation can be an anxiety-inducing term. Digital transformation can be especially challenging for enterprises with hundreds of employees, assets worth billions, and established business models. In our experience at Fingent, answering these questions greatly increases your organizations’ chances of getting your digital transformation right.
1. What does Digital Transformation really mean?
Digital transformation involves two parts:
- Transforming to digital: This is about using digital technology as a destination. Simply put, it is reorienting your organization to the strategic use of digital technologies. These technologies may include social networks, cloud platforms, products, and so on.
- Transforming digitally: This is about changing how you take the actual digital journey. In other words, this is about using digital technologies to change the nature of your business transformation.
We have found that the organizations that have implemented both aspects are reaping huge rewards than those that are using just one.
Read more: All You Need to Know About Digitization, Digitalization, and Digital Transformation
2. Where should I begin with Digital Transformation?
Because digital transformation affects so many aspects of organizational operations and customer behavior, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Hence, business leaders need to review the core elements of the business affected by the change.
Here is what you can do: Systematically work through the elements and rank each one by its possible impact and feasibility. Doing so will provide a clearer vision of how your business landscape is changing. It also helps you think through the implications of your business.
3. How to identify which customer journey matters the most?
Every business is aware of its own priorities. For most businesses, their first priority is to use digital technologies to connect internal resources to create a more compelling customer experience.
Focusing on individual interactions with your brand helps ground the transformation by optimizing the customer journey. This helps your organization to identify which technology, process, and capability are needed to deliver a great experience.
Here is what you can do: Map out the customer journey from start to finish. Then, focus on how you can make each touchpoint better, faster, and more efficient. This may require adjusting key performance indicators to track and reward progress on customer journeys.
4. What is the biggest impediment to Digital Transformation?
Lack of collective thinking can be a huge barrier that can block your journey to digital transformation. This happens when there is no up-to-date strategic view of who is responsible for progress and how technology should add value to your business.
Here is what you can do: Provide visible CEO support to build momentum. This would require a clear mandate on things to do, sufficient resources to develop a program, and profit-loss accountability.
5. Is it necessary to ‘Test and Learn’?
Successful organizations iterate until they get it right! Constant testing will help them deliver what customers want and understand why they want it. This approach will prevent organizations from getting caught up in overly deterministic specifications, needless market research, and ineffective long planning cycles.
Here is what you can do to ensure that your ‘test and learn’ is effective: Constantly review the actions of your teams. Also, review the investments against data on all areas of customers’ journey. This will help in increasing incremental sales.
Read more: A Detailed Guide to Understanding Digital Business Transformation
6. How do I know what is the right Budgetary Cycle?
An insufficient budgetary cycle can hamper digital transformation efforts. A flexible budgetary cycle will always be the most effective one, so your investment should be linked to progress.
Here is what you can do: You need not hesitate to pull the plug if key performance indicators fail. On the other hand, you must also be ready to quickly pump in more funding if the performance justifies it.
7. What are the benefits of a Challenger Board?
Remember not all ideas are brilliant. A ‘challenger board’ can ensure that a bad idea does not squander all your resources.
Here is what you can do: Choose people who know your business inside out to form your ‘challenger board.’ Based on their experience and outsider perspective, these experts can quickly uncover problems and identify opportunities for business disruption.
As a second option, you could set up a dedicated advisory board. They can help a company guide its organization through digital transformation.
Read more: Future Proof Your Business With 5G, Edge Computing, And Cloud!
How Can Fingent Help In Your Approach To Digital Transformation?
If your primary concern is speed to market and ongoing work agility, rest assured, Fingent top custom software development company, is here to help you. We are experts in AEC, an acronym that stands for Agility, Engagement, and Connectivity.
- Agility: Fingent will enable you to build and implement applications quickly.
- Engagement: Our experts at Fingent can prove appropriate application user experiences for each worker.
- Connectivity: We will make it easy for you to integrate your business with external systems and data sources.
Together with new cloud-based deployment, we at Fingent extend strong support for model-driven organizations. We will help you break through the inevitable barriers and increase your chances of achieving a successful digital transformation. Call us!
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.