You might have listened to the buzzword of digital transformation around you. There is no exact definition of digital transformation. According to experts, Digital transformation is the process of existing and modified technologies to improve a business’s efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity. Digital technologies are changing the way how our organizations operate. Manual work is cumbersome __ Digital transformation is shifting firms or organizations from manual work to automated work. Enterprises are moving towards digital transformation crazily. This transformation is exponential, like industry 4.0.
Examples of Digital Transformation:
Bringing Artificial Intelligence into your business like robotics or chatbots are the prime examples of digital transformation. Every technology that helps our business grow effectively, efficiently, and productively is part of digital transformation. Let’s break down this term into digital and transformation.
What is Digital?
People are using this term in many ways. In this context, digital is not referring to the internet, eCommerce store, getting likes, or retweets on social media. It is referring to the rapid adoption of technology.
What is the transformation?
The more operative word in this term is “transformation.” It is helping our business to work in a way; they are not used to be. This transformation is going to generate more revenue for your company. A more descriptive term in this context is the Business transformation or innovative transformation.
Who is your competition in the digital economy?
You should conduct market research to know about your competitors. Once you know your competitors, analyze their weaknesses, and make them your strength. Analyze how your competitors are transforming their business. After keen observation, take decisive steps to transform your business to generate more revenue.
The Digital Revolution:
No one exactly knows, when this revolution was started. But, most people stated that the digital revolution was started around 1980 with the internet and after with social networking, mobile devices, cloud computing, and big data.
Critical Factors to Consider
Employee skills needed for digital transformation:
For digital transformation, your employees or team members should have a solid core of the technology. You might often think about which skills employees should be hire or train. What are the necessary skills for digital transformation?
Here is the list of several skills that become more important for digital transformation. First of all, it’s essential to hire skills associated with agile development. Digital transformation requires Agile development, which focuses on developing projects iteratively rather than the traditional waterfall model.
The second required skill is the Scrum Master. Scrum is an agile framework for delivering, developing, and sustaining complicated products. Team members can hold meetings to discuss the next phase of development, chart progress, and test results.
The third significant skill is to incorporate the product owner into your team. In the digital era, everyone must think of the company’s traditional projects or services as a product. The product owner is the person who is accountable for the product that is in development. They set a vision for the product, track its progress, and ensure that the value is not compromised.
The fourth skill that is significant for digital transformation is UX. The responsibility of the UX designer is to fulfill the user’s needs. The main goal of user experience design is to design a system that offers a great experience to its users, keeping users loyal to the brand or product.
Processes necessary for digital transformation:
The primary process to impel digital transformation is Agile Development. It’s an iterative development where the customer is part of the team. Agile emphasizes face-to-face interactions where possible, incorporating quality processes and short feedback loops throughout the process.
Create your digital transformation plan
Strategic Planning at the speed of digital:
The digital arena is going to change faster than ever. This change will not stop, no matter what. For these circumstances, how planning is going to work? Should organizations prefer long term planning or short term planning?
Before digging into more resounding, let me tell you about this. Organizations should prefer both long term and short term strategic plans. Long-term planning is required to achieve the organization's primary goal. But shorter strategic planning cycles are necessary due to numerous reasons. For example, the plan that you made a year ago is not going to work for now.
There are four steps to create your digital transformation, which are the following.
First of all, ask yourself, How new technologies are going to affect your company? How will artificial intelligence or augmented reality impact your company? How will the fourth industrial revolution impact your organization? It’s essential to do that type of experimentation to know more about technologies that are affecting your organization.
The next step is working with the customers __Because; you are going to make products for them. Get suggestions from them. Ask them about the impressions of your product or service.
The third step is to identify modifications from your existing plans. Take feedback from the customers, and this feedback will lead you to a new avenue for the art of possible sessions.
These short term plans will lead you to refine your long term plans __ it will improve your organizations’ performance.
What are the four main types of digital transformation?
The following are the four main types of digital transformation.
- Business Process
- Business Model
- Domain
- Culture
Why is digital transformation important for your business?
It’s changing the way, how businesses operate, and how they deliver value to their customers. It’s helping companies, how to engage with their customers, and how to meet their expectations. Businesses are not working the way they used to be. Now they are more advance and modern. They treat customers like kings and know how to satisfy them. If a business is not going to transform according to the technology, it will be left behind.
What are the elements of digital transformation?
Here is the list of five critical elements of digital transformation.
- Always focus on customers and meet their expectations
- Use technologies to enhance your sales
- Transform operational processes to provide a better user experience
- Focus on customer services
- Transform business model and provide value to your customers
What are the benefits of digital transformation for your business?
Here are the five main benefits businesses are getting by implementing digital transformation.
- Improve Efficiency
Efficiency is the main benefit and advantage organizations are getting through digital transformation. Now, processes and workflows are more efficient. Data flows continuously from department to department. Cycle time has been reduced due to Digital transformation.
- Cost-saving
New technology, in some cases, can cause you more cost, but this is not the case every time. Digital transformation, if implemented effectively, can cause you less costly. Technologies are reducing the labor force by implementing automated work. For any business, cost-saving is the top benefit on top of all.
- Provide value to the customers
In the past, people didn’t focus on the customers, but now technology has changed people’s perspectives. Now businesses pay more attention to provide value to their customers. Due to customers, your business is going to generate revenue.
- Increase productivity
Digital transformation drives your business’s productivity by reducing production costs, improving labor, and enabling innovation.
- Better Marketing and Revenue Growth:
In the past, marketing was not that much important. But now, better marketing is everything for any business. It helps businesses to market their products. Through marketing, more people will know about your product __ it will give rise to more sales __ more revenue will be generated in that case.
Why will most digital transformation fail?
Digital transformation is not easy. It’s pretty hard to change people’s perspectives. Here is the list of reasons why digital transformation fails.
- Lack of expertise:
Lack of experience leads to basic mistakes such as improper planning, lack of clear strategies, risk management, and incorrect goal setting. A large number of these mistakes lead to the failure of digital transformation.
- Internal Resistance:
A lot of courage is required to start new projects and products due to risks. Most organizations are not going to digital transformation because they are not willing to take the risk.
- Ignoring customer experience:
Organizations transform the tech part while sometimes ignore the customer experience. It is the biggest mistake of any organization because customers keep the business alive. For them, you are going to make products, how could you ignore them.
- Senior management is not interested:
Do seniors want to transform their organizations? You have to make them interested in digital changes. It is the responsibility of top management to motivate their workforce to adopt risk-averse projects.
- Not knowing about competitors:
You should always conduct market research to know about your competitors. It will help you to understand who your competitors are, how they are applying the digital transformation. Analysis of this information will make it easier for you to construct upcoming plans and goals.
Conclusion:
After reading this article, I hope you are better prepared to seize the opportunities while starving off some of the failures associated with the digital transformation. We have talked about digital transformation and its examples. Later on, we have talked about the critical factors to consider and how to create a digital transformation plan. At last, we have talked about the importance, benefits, and failures of the digital transformation. The journey of transforming your business is not going to be easy. But, it will be thrilling, and it will lead your company to new heights of glory. I wish you the best of luck.
Published by: Ayyaz Digital Marketing
