Digital transformation is reinventing business. It is not just about applying technology to your business; it is also about creating entirely new business models on the backbone of technology. Non-digital or manual processes are transformed in a digital way to modify existing business processes, culture and customer experience to meet the requirements of changing market and business. One of the examples is Cloud Computing.
In data entry services, digital transformation has affected various key areas, most notably Intelligent Capture, which replaces manual capture with fully-automated conversion of documents to business-ready data, that means it identifies and extracts critical information from incoming documents or in machine-readable electronic form without extensive guidance from a user.
Five key benefits of digital transformation are:
- Efficiency is improved due to quick workflow by replacing manual processes with electronic versions.
- Customer satisfaction is improved.
- Robust decision making.
- Profits are enhanced.
- With improved efficiency and better decision-making, market penetration becomes more effective and it helps to bring in loyal customers.
Depending on the nature of the business, digital transformation can take numerous forms. With a digital transformation strategy, your business will:
- Minimize waste: Manual department tasks such as slow data entry, validation bottlenecks, spreadsheets and logs, etc consume valuable time and energy and are prone to human error. Digitization helps avoid this.
- Give importance to people: By letting your employees perform valuable work and relieving them from tedious, repetitive tasks you can prove how much you value them.
- Saves money: With the implementation of automated digital tools, organizations can cut operation costs and reduce paper-based processes.
- Primes you for the future: You can accomplish more tasks in less time and thereby raise productivity and improve customer experience.
According to learn.g2.com,72% of companies had or were working on a digital transformation strategy by 2018. The four types of transformation are as follows:
- Process Transformation: Here it takes steps to digitize individual business processes. Things like incorporating automation systems to modernize your processes, such as reducing repetitive tasks, save costs, providing multi-platform service app to connect with the business.
- Business Model Transformation: It aims at building fundamental blocks of how value is delivered in the industry. For instance, insurance companies using data and analytics to set policy rates.
- Domain Transformation: The area of domain transformation is where we see surprisingly less focus but enormous opportunity. For instance, online retailer Amazon entered into a new market by launching Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is now the largest cloud computing or infrastructure service, in a domain which was owned by Microsoft and IBM in earlier times.
- Cultural or Organizational Transformation: Necessary work is done for the transformation of formerly-analog business into a digital-first organization. To reach and to support the desired culture, it requires changing hearts, minds and skills of the employees.
Differences: Digitization, Digitalization and Digital Transformation
Digitization
It is the technical process of converting information from analog to digital which means that it is the conversion of images, text or sound in which the information is organized into bits. Digitization is a necessary step in a digital transformation process. It is very common within the healthcare industry, because years of analog patient records must be added to digital patient tracking systems.
Digitalization
Digitalization occurs with digitization. Because it is the use of digital technologies and the digitized data to improve or enhance how work gets done, thereby it changes a business model and delivers new revenue and value-added opportunities. For instance, digitalization would refer to the use of digital patient tracking system (which is mentioned in the previous example) itself to replace previous analog methodologies.
Digital Transformation
It brings digitization and digitalization together into a coherent business effort to renew existing processes and discover new digital business methodologies. All new-digital business opportunities can be explored with the addition of technology.
Developing a digital transformation strategy for your business involves these steps:
- Analyze the status quo: Conduct a complete review of your existing business operations to recognize any technologies that are in use, looking for processes that don’t meet current business needs or long-term performance goals and also to recognize business challenges that still need solutions. This is like having a kind of broad situational awareness that is needed to make big changes in your business operations. It is very crucial at this stage to gain operational understanding of how the various processes under review interact with each other to minimize the troublesome effects that can happen as a part of this process change or to suggest what changes should be made and in what order.
- Set business objectives: Set business objectives and you should calculate how new technology matches your culture. The goals must be well defined, measurable and time-limited. For instance, if the digital transformation involves gaining new digital customer service operations, the expected goal is increased customer satisfaction ratings as judged by whatever feedback mechanism is used. It is important to ensure that there is already existing data available to judge future results against or to take steps to collect such data before any changes are made.
- Document risks: Before changing to digital transformation, businesses will develop pre-existing risk or the whole new areas of risk within the business operations. Analyze, discuss and document the risks to update the business’ risk management plans and create migration strategies accordingly. For instance, if the digital transformation includes the mass digitization of customer data, that will change the size and the nature of risk associated with a data breach. The cost associated with handling or guarding against those risks should be considered in the complete digital transformation plan.
- Select the right digital tools: After you set the business goals for digital transformation, you need to choose the right digital tools and technologies that will make it possible. At this stage, the company can plan a budget for their program. It is important to remember that some features of a particular company’s digital transformation will be less expensive than others. For instance, adding telecommuting options to a business’ technology arsenal is often at the lower end of the cost scale and things like big data and analytics are more complex and costlier. So, the latter is used to be the key part of most companies’ digital transformation plans.
- Create a leadership structure: Once you understand the size and general contours of the challenge, it is time to make a leadership team to execute the plan. For that, you can hire a new executive or promote an existing executive as Chief Information Officer (CIO) into the role. He will help manage the company’s digital transformation steps. As a part of the process, the CIO should strengthen the internal communications infrastructure.
- Lead with training and education: First prepare the ground with employees’ training before making any real changes in business operations or the tools used to get the jobs done. It is the front line workers that play the biggest role in the success and failure of the complete initiative at every stage of digital transformation journey. In fact, it is the training effort that will bring about the company culture shift necessary to change the way all the employees approach their job.
- Keep analyzing the impact: This is the final part of the planning process. By analyzing the implemented technology, you can see how well or how badly it is going. By measuring the results, it is possible to make necessary changes to something that is not working out as planned. It is important to understand that to succeed in the digital transformation process you have to go through several planning iterations on the way to the ultimate goal.
In today’s economy, some have to travel a greater distance to achieve complete digital transformation, while others have to modify their existing digital strengths. The various sectors that have digital transformation opportunities are:
- Healthcare
- Banking
- Education
- Telecom and Communications
- Financial Services
In simple words, digital transformation is the transformation of non-digital or manual processes to digital processes for a more efficient and effective economic value creation process. It holds the key to innovation. When changes in technology increase, it forces the industries also to change and helps to find great success by allowing them to work faster, smarter and cheaper than the competition. Professional data entry services can prove to be immensely helpful in your digital transformation journey.
