Transform for the Future: The 4 Pillars of Digital Transformation

Transform for the Future: The 4 Pillars of Digital Transformation

From car dealerships enabling online support and sales service, to family-owned restaurants facilitating mobile preorder and pickup, and manufacturers managing dynamic raw material sourcing online – evolving market demands have led way to digital transformation which in turn has proven to be the ticket to increased visibility, resiliency, and agility.

Digital transformation is an intricate and sometimes complex journey that may vary with respect to your industry and digital maturity, in fact, it can mean different things to different businesses. Digital transformation goes beyond remote working and Teams meetings, micro, small, medium, and large enterprises have sought out means and ways to operate their businesses through technology and digitally engage with diverse stakeholders, from their customers and employees to their supply chain.

Transformation, if done correctly, requires alignment across all business operations and objectives, ensuring it complements employee expertise, execution priorities, accounts for measurements and metrics, and drives constant innovation. According to a study, a customer-centric transformation with operational and IT improvements can generate up to a 30% increase in customer satisfaction and up to a 20% improvement in employee satisfaction.

Nowadays, businesses are turning digital transformation services to empower remote workforces, deliver exceptional services and solutions to their customers, optimize operations and productivity, and create immersive experiences that would have seemed challenging in the past.

This blog highlights the five pillars that helped businesses achieve success via effective digital transformation:

Digitizing Operations: The Digital Vision

The infiltration of technology no longer comes as a surprise, in fact, the latest platforms deliver advanced, effective tools to serve customers at lower maintenance costs, compliments employee expertise, and drives constant innovation. Successful digital transformation relies heavily on leveraging modern technology and aligning it with business objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs).

The first and sometimes most challenging pillar is defining your vision. It is essential that you create a foundation by which varying departments, directly impacted by digital strategy, such as sales, legal, finance, or HR can agree to prioritize funding and resources. Remember to account for any processes that need to be changed along the way, the dozens of touchpoints, countless applications and backend systems, and hundreds of legacy systems. Finally, decide on how you are going to run and operate your ongoing business and keep your commitments to the market, in parallel to establishing your digital vision.

Engage Customers with Technology

With the evolving market landscape and invent strategies, the need to reimagine the role of tech, process optimization, and system automation in the workplace has become vital to business continuity and sustained growth, to ensure you stay ahead of the curve.

Conduct a detailed analysis of your business and unleash the power of digitalization on old processes. Your customers, their pain points, and your value proposition are the core of your new business model and digital transformation journey, keep the customer in mind when devising and prioritizing your digital roadmap. Validate the initial considerations that resulted from your Vision discussion and focus on near-term wins that succeed in streamlining key customer touchpoints and result in cost-saving initiatives.

Investing in digital technology to improve digital connections across your business can help in optimizing processes, managing data and deriving insights in real-time, enhancing customer experiences, and more.

Metrics and measurement

Every project needs to be outcome-based. For example, increase operational efficiency by 25%, or reduce sourcing costs by 3% YoY through a new business model. Establishing such goals or targets for aspects of your business where data collection and information processing are already in the works, can be considered somewhat easy. However, the success of your digital transformation journey lies in measuring areas of the business where there is no historical reference.

Metrics represent indicators and milestones of managing your progress towards transformation. Patience, reassurance, and transparency across your team are key to gaining support in establishing the digital roadmap. It is important that all team members understand development metrics are being measured, they should be involved in the process and be part of the overall target. Transformation projects involve several teams such as software engineering, design and UX business architecture, software delivery teams, and production management.

Culture

Break down silos, push beyond the boundaries of the status quo, and empower employees with the right tools. One thing that determines the success of digital transformation, is a company’s capability to flourish through disruption, enabling collaboration around a single source of truth. It is vital that the leadership play its part in answering relevant questions, creating a unified vision, and supporting all employees in adapting to inevitable change.

Organizational culture is an important cornerstone of any successful digital transformation program and has a significant role to play in enabling wide-scale digital change. More commonly than not, the employees of a company tend to be reluctant toward significant change, therefore, digital transformation cannot be a top-down decision. It has to be a movement with a strong, understanding, and human-centric work philosophy that embraces change whilst embracing the company’s vision of enhancing performance to ensure better productivity and customer satisfaction with digital solutions.

Wrapping Up

Digital transformation is a series of small and large projects across your business that creates efficiencies, enables automation, sustains growth, and drives the generation of your revenue.

The digital imperative is here and it’s no longer an option when navigating the current business climate. Countless businesses have already permanently changed the way they do business. It’s not just how you work with remote employees, but also how you interact with customers both digitally and in person. The five pillars of a digital transformation are a foundation for alignment, realization, and prioritization that allows you to optimize investment in technology, processes, people, and time.




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