Is your business making a digital transformation? Research shows that 91 percent of organizations have or will have a digital-first business model. By adopting the power of modern technology and the internet, organizations can enhance their business processes and obtain better efficiencies. However, your business may not be ready if you haven’t established clear goals for digital transformation.
Before you set goals that align with your vision, you must first understand digital transformation. The transformation will begin to impact four major areas of business: your processes, business model, domain and company culture.
What Is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation refers to using digital technologies in your organization to enhance its operations. The meaning of transformation can differ for each organization. However, you can achieve it successfully by starting with a strategy to redefine the four main areas of your business.
A digital strategy doesn’t mean you are only looking to upgrade to digital; it means you should be transforming your business as a whole. So, you must ask yourself why you need to change, what you need to achieve success and how you will achieve it.
Digital transformation will benefit your organization if you adopt the latest digital tools. It helps your company become ready to fulfill tasks more effectively, hire new talent, transform company culture and orient current employees.
To follow the path of digital transformation, here are the primary goals to help you succeed.
1. Boost Collaboration
Digital transformation begins when you have everyone on board in the process. Your first objective should be to increase collaboration across employees in all departments. When you facilitate collaboration, you help your employees connect to the main goal. In the end, you have people working together to meet the end goal.
According to one survey, 39 percent of employees say their organization doesn’t collaborate enough. Only 9 percent of employees felt their company had effective collaboration tools and systems.
Digital tools such as Trello can help teams collaborate and stay organized on project management tasks. Then there are apps like Zoom or Google Meet that allow people to virtually connect, hold meetings and pitch new ideas to each other.
Once your organization has a collaborative mindset, employees can share their expertise and increase productivity.
2. Enhance Employee Performance
Digital trends and technologies can disrupt businesses. Therefore, it requires expertise when adopting digital tools in your industry. So, preparing your employees for new tools and technologies will help them meet the changes in market demands.
For instance, you can use software to organize and deliver products or services to deliver quality and become more efficient. AI (artificial intelligence) and other innovative tools can transform your business by helping employees focus on tasks and improve productivity.
3. Gain Efficiency
One of the ways you can achieve a digital transformation is by increasing efficiency. Using digital tools and technologies, you can automate tasks through a digital process. These tools help companies develop automated processes and solutions to streamline orders, customer onboarding and more.
When you begin to increase efficiency, you add more value to your services by creating a seamless process and fulfilling customer needs.
4. Build a New Business Model
Empowering your business with digital transformation means you’ll have to replace your old business model with a new one. A great example of this is UPS. Its transformation took it from a package delivery company to a tech company. It involved synchronizing its operations and logistics strategy with digital tools to meet customer demand.
The two main challenges that UPS faced regarding customer experience were fast deliveries and real-time tracking. Now, the company can procure a new business model by effectively using AI and big data analytics.
Companies have numerous growth opportunities when implementing digital transformation and redefining their business models.
5. Become Agile
Achieving agility in your business helps to facilitate rapid decision-making, employee empowerment and adaptation to a new environment. However, a new skill only occurs when preparing teams to adopt a new mindset.
For example, teams must have constant communication, collaboration, trust and flexibility. Achieving a digital mindset comes from an agile mentality and helps businesses to thrive in a digital environment.
6. Develop Competitive Advantage
Anyone can face the risk of being outsmarted by their competitors. In a world where competition is high, the pressure is leading organization to make digital transformation a priority. Businesses that adopt powerful technologies like AI and cloud-based apps make workflows seamless.
Once a business is open to becoming digital, it remains ahead of the competition by increasing revenue, employee productivity, efficiency and customer satisfaction.
7. Obtain Digital Maturity
Digital maturity should be the end goal when achieving a digital transformation. When you shift your processes through digital technologies, this means you understand how to implement changes. Moving forward, you’ll create a DMM (digital maturity model) where you assess your company’s level of digital maturity. Businesses can employ DMM to unlock higher-level goals.
There are numerous benefits to organizations that apply digital maturity. For instance, companies that achieve digital maturity center their culture around innovation and creativity—leading to growth and the ability to measure success.
In fact, 45 percent of companies with higher maturity experienced revenue growth.
Attaining Digital Transformation
Adopting digital transformation can do wonders for your business, but only if you build a strategy first. Using digital tools and technologies alone won’t help your business transform successfully. You must have the whole company involved during the process.
Once you make a digital transformation in your business, you’ll positively impact your products and services by achieving the goals listed here. As a result, your company stays on top of the competition, maximizing its profitability.
