The whole world is going digital and businesses are now hugely investing in digital transformation to improve business processes and deliver value to customers. Digital transformation means using advanced digital technology to create new ways of performing business processes, improve organizational culture and enhance customer experience. Digitization could help meet the changing business and market requirements and drive growth in the market. Businesses that are striving towards digitization can approach reliable data conversion services that would help convert all business data into machine readable formats to provide actionable insights and efficiency.
The more available your information is in digital format, the better will be the engagement with your target audience. The success of digital transformation depends on having a strong framework and co-ordination between all the elements. So, here are the main elements required for a business to go digital.
- Technology: Technology is one of the main elements required for successful digital transformation. From the Internet of Things, to blockchain, data lakes, and artificial intelligence, technology advancement is booming and it provides businesses transformational opportunity. However, adapting to these technologies and integrating them with the existing system could be complex and it could also lead to technical debt. These issues can be resolved by people who have in-depth knowledge about technology and can work with it. In Businesses can consider integrating institutional IT also so that the technologists can provide and demonstrate business value with every technology innovation. This will be possible only if the leaders of the technology domain are good communicators and also have a good sense to make technological choice and balance technology innovation with technical debt.
- Data: Many companies still struggle with poor quality data and digital transformation requires good data quality and analytics. Businesses often tend to store huge volumes of data and they know that the quality of data is bad. Knowing this, businesses still tend to waste their resources by failing to assign proper roles and responsibilities and they blame IT function for this failure. To solve this issue, you need technology along with good talent with both great breadth and depth in data. You will also need to convince large numbers of people at the front lines of organizations to take on new roles as data customers and data creators.
- Organizational change capability and work culture: This includes team work, leadership, emotional intelligence and other elements required for organizational change. For organization, it is important to embrace technology, data and business process along with human side of change. The best choice is to look for people with excellent skills who can work on both sides. Similarly, to move quickly and get better results with technological change, a flat hierarchy system in organization structure is essential that can support a culture as well as quickly execute tasks and make decisions, keeping teams free from the weight of organizational governance and approval processes.
- Process: Transformation helps to find ways to meet customer needs, to manage across silos and ensure seamless connection of work activities. Find talent that can align silos in the direction of the customer to enhance the current processes and design a new one. They should also be able to understand when incremental process improvement is enough and when radical process reengineering is essential.
- Customer relationship: Keeping your customer at the front is important for the success of any digital transformation process. According to IDG, 44% of companies have already moved to a digital-first approach for customer experience. If customer expectations are met at a faster rate, then it would reflect in every customer satisfaction score survey.
Examples of Digital Transformation
Nike
Nike turned to digital transformation and decided to reach out to their customers directly instead of selling their products through vendors. Digital transformation has helped to shorten their development cycle and allowed them to launch new products quickly. With the help of data analytics and connecting with their customers at a personal level, Nike could understand their customers’ preferences and started recommending the right products. Nike’s revenue grew from $33.5 billion to $39.1 billion and its stock price jumped from $53 to $90 within two years.
General Electric
General electric has a history of 125 years but they failed to keep up with their name. But later they decided to embrace 3D printing technology. It helped them to drastically cut down on transportation and storage costs. General Electric has already produced 19 different airplane turbine parts by using 3D printing. After getting positive results from the 3D printing, they decided to pursue it for long term and are planning to invest $3.5 billion.
A strong digital workplace can revolutionize any business. So, adapting quickly to a digital technology is becoming crucial for organizations to stay competitive and survive in the market. Today, businesses are experimenting with digital transformation using big data analytics, cloud computing etc. So, if you want to adopt a good digital transformation strategy then the first step is to approach a reliable provider of data conversion services that can convert all data into digital format so that you can use it to derive valuable insights.
