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Steps to Create a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy

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    February 1, 2022
Steps to Create a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy

Investments in initiatives related to digital transformation have increased significantly since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations have shifted entirely towards new business models for supporting efficiency, flexibility, and effective cost-optimization. Mission-critical solutions of all types are undergoing digitization –including remote learning, online shopping experiences, and medical care through the automated supply chain or telemedicine optimization.

The pandemic has not been an easy period for organizations all around the world. However, those that are thriving have been successful in embracing the digital service mindset. Services remain critical for organizations towards effectively delivering the desired experiences their users and stakeholders expect. A digital service serves to be an online capability or function fulfilling the need for a digital partner, a customer, internal consumer, or citizen. Let us help you understand how you can come up with a reliable digital transformation strategy for your business. 

What is a Digital Transformation Strategy?

A digital transformation strategy is a dedicated plan for helping you in analyzing your own needs, understanding the role of technology, and setting business objectives. 

As a matter of fact, research reveals that 70 percent of organizations have a dedicated digital transformation strategy in place or are currently working on one. At the same time, 50 percent of organizations also reveal that the respective digital transformation budget is on the rise year after year. The given statistics reveal that the concept of digital transformation is here to stay. For keeping businesses going, companies need to plan for the upcoming changes through solutions like digital transformation consulting. 

Importance of a Well-structured Digital Transformation Strategy

The modern range of enterprises is expected to continually look for innovative ways for better adopting and competing in the modern digital landscape. The way enterprises across the globe are achieving this notion is through the creation of a well-defined digital transformation strategy. You can take help from reliable digital transformation services. 

Digital transformation allows organizations to leverage the benefits of modern technologies responsible for automating processes, improving customer experiences, increasing operational flexibility and agility, and helping employees in becoming more productive. Companies that do not have a dedicated digital transformation strategy will be putting themselves at risk of falling behind in the competition.

Digital transformation is crucial to organizations of the world as it allows them to harness the benefits of newer, cutting-edge technologies towards improving the ways they are capable of competing in the respective markets and serving the end customers. With the wide range of service options, modern consumers have nowadays, the relationship of the vendor with the customer has become highly critical. Businesses are expected to be flexible and agile for meeting the ever-evolving demands. 

There are lots of benefits of digital transformation like in addition to this, a proper digital transformation strategy helps employees in being more engaged. With updated applications, systems, and high-end solutions, it becomes easier for employees to ensure communications with end customers, co-workers, clients, and partners. Therefore, it leads to improved collaboration throughout. 

Creating the Best Digital Transformation Strategy for Your Business

Digital transformation is a journey requiring technological, cultural, and operational shifts while putting the overall user experience at the forefront. By shifting applications to the revolutionary cloud-first infrastructure (like IoT development), and delivering services on the digital front, enterprises obtain more freedom to adapt to business and customer needs. However, how shall you start? What are the important steps required for starting this journey? 

Here are some important steps you can consider while transforming the digitized services of your business:

#Understand the Cloud Strategy of Your Business

It is important to identify the range of critical services that you will be moving to the cloud. When you understand the cloud strategy of your business and what service initiatives remain in the process of being digitized, your team is able to analyze which specific parts of the business and stakeholders are ready for the transformation. 

As such, the team also becomes open to executing a customer-centric, modern approach to bespoke service management.

#Define Your Vision

Before jumping into the notion of digital transformation, you should analyze the experience that you wish to offer as a business. Throughout the process, you can ask the following set of questions:

  • Where are the strategic gaps in the business?
  • How can technology be used for supporting employees?
  • What challenges does your team encounter while engaging in a typical business process?

When you are clear on what you aim at addressing and what your objectives are, it will place you on a dedicated path to creating a successful digital transformation technologies and strateggies.At the same time, it is also imperative for you to think about the impact of digital transformation on the end customers. Therefore, you can raise questions like:

  • What experience do you wish to offer to the customers?
  • How can the given set of initiatives help towards meeting the changing expectations and needs?

This tends to have an instant impact on the bottom line. Most high-tech organizations report that they have been successful in cutting costs by around 10-20 percent with the help of digital transformation. They also reveal a total revenue growth of around 10-15 percent as they transformed the processes related to customer experiences. 

#Identify the Top Important Services of Your Organization

It is important to understand pivotal customer-centric incidents to search for clues about potential pain points and affected services of your business. Does your business depict services as followed constantly by executive leadership? You should look for important stakeholders in the development, operations, and security areas of your business. 

After this, you can go ahead with looking for executive stakeholders who are responsible for driving initiatives related to the digital business transformation strategy and the reasons behind changing the same. Some of the core reasons for bringing about digital transformation for businesses are cost reduction, new market research, and risk mitigation. From a technical point of view, modernizing the legacy infrastructure or modern technical expertise might also be responsible for driving the initiatives. 

#Set Up Shared Business KPIs Across Different Teams

As a business enterprise, you can think of partnering with service stakeholders across teams or departments for determining goals and objectives that can be shared throughout the organization. The shared objectives should effectively align with the respective business goals like customer satisfaction or revenue generation. Much more than ever before, technical teams nowadays have the opportunity to align the initiatives with the company’s objectives. 

IT teams and CIOs are expected to demonstrate the business value of IT technology. At the same time, it is the responsibility of the development teams to protect business performance. This is because more applications will be required for generating ampler revenues. 

Bring tech stakeholders and businesses together for defining shared KPIs initially. Then, you should go ahead with gathering the right metrics for supporting the existing KPIs across different departments. 

#Involve the Right Leaders

The next important step to ensuring digital transformation is involving the right leaders in the entire process. As a matter of fact, research reveals that organizations engaging a chief digital officer for supporting the process of digital transformation are 1.6 times more likely to ensure a successful transformation. 

When you have experienced leaders on board with the planning and execution of a digital transformation, it turns out to be successful. It can serve as the major difference between success and failure with the respective initiatives. For the best outcomes, you can ensure transformation with assistance from a reliable artificial intelligence company. 

#Gather Ample Resources and Expertise

Digital transformation will require expertise along with a team of dedicated people to keep the company on track. There are specific avenues you can consider for putting up your team together. You can think of selecting people from within the organization, outsourcing, or working with a reliable technology partner. 

At the same time, there are specific traits that you should look for in such teams or individuals to work with. They should be willing to learn about the latest technologies while being open to ideas and having the willingness to adapt as the organization will continue evolving.

#Selection of the Right Technology

There are several solutions, vendors, or platforms that can help you in meeting your digital transformation goals. What is the problem then? Most organizations out there do not commit ample time to ponder over what they actually require before implementing the technology. This might end up in wasting ample time, money, and could also lead to digital burnout. 

However, you can easily avoid this situation. Before the addition of any new technology, you should ask: Does the technology that you wish to invest in align with the digital transformation strategy? Will it be helpful in filling the gap in the organization? When you can answer both the questions affirmatively, you can choose the desired technology to help you with the creation of a successful digital transformation strategy. 

#Set Up Predictive Insights for a Solution or Service

With the capability of visualizing and monitoring a service comprehensively, the next step should be involved with establishing and training dedicated algorithms for generating predictive intelligence for a particular set of services. You can commence by launching different and advanced algorithms on a specific service. 

You should avoid implementing a response until the service has been validated. Then, you can instruct your team to train the ML (Machine Learning) algorithms on KPI status. These can vary from one industry to another. Some instances include claims processing, citizen services, and mobile payment performance. 

#Design a Center of Excellence for Existing Data

Broaden the monitoring strategy and your company’s holistic framework to more teams. Then, you can go ahead with advocating the benefits of linking more data into a single place. As more teams continue adopting the holistic monitoring strategy, the process of buy-in will get easier. One method of conveying the value is that teams should observe the data in the all-new proposed approach.

You can offer the creation of a dedicated dashboard for the teams to use. In case some issue will arise, you can make use of relevant intelligence for communicating what went wrong within the systems. Eventually, allow orchestration and automation across processes for predicting more outages and reducing remediation times. You should also include accountability mechanisms using data and analytics for driving efficient workflows and highly automated processes. 

#Find the Right Technology Partner and Analyze Resource Requirements

As markets around the world continue opening, it is giving rise to talent wars. SMBs and young startups are not expected to take up the additional burden of ensuring technology management. Their entire focus can be effectively channelized in the services related to business excellence and processes. A trustworthy and experienced technology partner can help in bringing about a major difference in the long run. 

Some of the major challenges that every in-house technology team might face are:

  • Cost escalation
  • Technology upgrades
  • Challenges with advanced technologies
  • Requirement for new SaaS solutions
  • IT talent attrition

#Building Capabilities on the Go

Modernization of core operating processes and infrastructure will help companies enhance the digital experience for both employees and customers.

With new and advanced infrastructure, organizations have the added responsibility of hiring new talent and training existing employees. Business leaders and IT teams should be engaged in the creation of a comprehensive training program for benefitting the transformation efforts.

The expertise and training delivered to existing employees will not offer any true value to the business once you will revamp the existing processes. Even with several years of relevant experience, most employees struggle with navigating through new software solutions. This is the reason why continuous training is vital.

Business leaders should understand that there is the requirement of two types of core skills for ensuring success –application-oriented and job-related. The training mechanism for both the skills might change from time to time. However, training should continue as an ongoing process.

To Conclude 

Although there are digital transformation challenges as well. IT projects might continue running behind schedule, processes might have gaps, training might not be sufficient, and new regulatory challenges might appear. With the utilization of the right digital transformation strategies and tools, the existing challenges can be resolved. Companies should act on the outline that is created while improvising as the project will proceed. 

Digital transformation is a journey and will not take place overnight. Through the alignment of high-end digital transformation services and supporting resources, you can effectively ensure the prioritization of end-user expectations. 

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