Digital transformation can not only benefit your company by improving its processes and productivity, but it can also deliver better customer and employee experiences. Below are several key factors you should consider when building robust digital transformation strategies, along with more information about how these factors can impact your company. Keep reading to learn more!
Digital Transformation, which is “the strategic adoption of digital technologies to improve processes and productivity to deliver better customer and employee experiences,” has become an integral part of strategic initiatives and investments for businesses because of its ability to transform customer engagement and reduce costs, and increase competitiveness. However, when trying to decide on the priority of initiatives, companies often have to deal with answering questions such as “what strategies will work for my company? And which should I choose and why?”
Below are examples of key factors you should consider during this decision-making process:
Understand What Works For You: To decide which strategies to use, you need to understand what digital support is required to achieve your goals. Once you attach digital support requirements to a goal, it allows for a clearer picture of what methods to implement, making it easier to determine the benefits and challenges of using different approaches. An example of this can be using digital technologies as a tool to meet a specific goal, such as automating internal processes that are otherwise repetitive and prone to human error to reduce costs and streamline operations.
Align Transformation With Business Goals: Once you have a strategy in mind to reach a specific goal, you must ensure that everyone within your organization is on board, from top-level executives to line employees. “Alignment is the most important step to a successful transformation, and it needs to be supported from the top down,” Bernie Gracy, the chief digital officer at Agero, said. “CEOs and boards need to communicate that the move to digital is the right strategy, outline the right outcomes, and mitigate the fear of the ‘substitutional effect’ whereby former processes or products get replaced by new or digital ones.”
Test Out Different Strategies: After choosing the digital transformation strategies to help meet your company’s goals, the next step in this process is trying them out to see which one of those provide the intended results. For example, suppose you are replacing older technology with newer tech to streamline operations and eliminate former processes. In that case, rather than using a ‘big bang’ approach, it will be more advantageous to use an iterative agile strategy to determine which technology meets the business goals in a cost-effective way without causing significant disruptions. Working with a service provider like Boston Technology Corporation can help you ‘test drive’ emerging technologies via POC initiatives before committing to onboarding them within the company.
Identify The Team You Need: One of the most critical parts of this process is identifying the team you need to reach your digital transformation goals. With many moving parts involved in executing any digital transformation initiative, having a team committed to collaboration, continuous learning, and adapting to changing business conditions and priorities becomes imperative for success. This team typically comprises business and IT evangelists, user experience designers, and often outside service providers such as BTC with needed technology expertise and experience. Once you have identified the team, you can sit down and work with them to create a plan for implementing the initiatives, what that timetable will look like, and the cost of implementing them.
Risk Management: As with any changes, managing risk is a necessary component of this process. By having a risk management strategy in place, you can anticipate and analyze these risks continuously and figure out how to mitigate them as much as possible. If you are working with a service provider to help guide you through this process, they can be a valuable asset in determining potential risks along the way and how to deal with them.
So, How Can BTC Play A Role In This Process?
As mentioned above, a service provider such as Boston Technology Corporation can help analyze areas in your company that can be candidates for digital transformation initiatives, do rapid iterative POC’s for emerging technologies, help manage the process and mitigate risk. To see how BTC can guide you through the process of digital transformation, click here.
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