5 Simple But Effective Digital Transformations

Organizations are constantly being told they must have an effective digital transformation strategy to survive. For many established companies, this realization marks the beginning of a long, expensive and difficult journey to fundamentally change the way they do business.Do you need help?

If businesses make the digital transformation process too onerous and bureaucratic, however, they can scupper their chances of success. Given that the end goal is a dramatic boost to business agility, it’s ironic that a digital transformation strategy can bog down an organization for months — sometimes years — in internal squabbles and confusion, tricky legacy migration/integration projects and a host of other technical, cultural and financial issues. It can feel like wading through treacle in unsuitable footwear.

However, it is possible to make speedier strides with digital transformation by prioritizing measures that bring rapid operational and/or customer benefits. In this way, you can engineer some ‘quick wins’ to accelerate necessary cultural and process changes. These are often the biggest hurdles to success. This can be achieved by generating a high level of early business buy-in to your strategy. While your specific areas of focus will vary according to the size, nature and culture of your business, we outline below some of the tactics commonly worth considering.

Digital Transformation #1. Improve staff communications

One of the key goals of a digital transformation strategy should be to speed up workflow. Many organizations are still made up of various departments that see themselves as separate silos. Therefore often minimizing their dealings and communications with other departments and teams. Similarly, many workflow processes are designed around hierarchical chains of command. Certain actions may have to be sent up the chain for approval before a particular task can continue, usually for purely historical reasons rather than this being the most effective governance structure.

In a digitally transformed world, employees should get things done as quickly as possible. This means breaking down old silos and hierarchies and allowing staff to collaborate and communicate directly with each other according to immediate needs. Pointless red tape or inefficient chains of command should not be obstacles. So how can you achieve this simply?

• Ditch email for internal communications — instead, adopt a fast, modern, easy-to-use collaboration tool such as Slack or (especially if you’re currently running your business mostly on Microsoft software) the company’s new Teams product. Such tools allow people to collaborate easily, fluidly and directly with each other.This impacts both fixed and ad hoc teams, bypassing old silos and hierarchies.
• Certain staff are likely to be more enthusiastic about this change than others. Use these people as evangelists. They will communicate the benefits to those more reluctant or unsure. Senior and line-of-business managers should lead the way here — train them up first and ensure they adopt the tools, buy into their benefits and communicate them effectively to their teams.
• Provide training and hand-holding for any staff reticent about the change. Explain how any new collaboration tools can boost productivity, eliminate frustrating delays and give more autonomy to work in the way that suits them.

Digital Transformation #2. Release trapped data

A central, holistic view of your operational data easily monitored, processed and analyzed is ultimately going to be essential as your digital transformation strategy matures. But when monitoring try to make as much data as possible available in a standard format across the whole business.

• Focus on essential operational systems first. If data is trapped in standalone legacy systems, use APIs to join these systems up to any newer tools and services you might adopt.
• When selecting new digital tools and services, try to find ones that can connect to your existing systems without the need for excess custom development.
• Some tools have pre-built APIs that let them hook into a wide range of systems. In other cases, you may find a third-party has already written the API you need and made it freely available online.

Digital Transformation #3. Understand and leverage emerging technologies and cloud services

Put together a team of people who are enthusiastic about digital transformation to keep a close eye on emerging cloud services, applications and technologies that might be helpful to different areas of your business — either operationally, or for developing new products and services. Among other things, you need to monitor market developments closely and continually to identify:

• Software-as-a-service offerings that could improve your agility;
• Tools and devices that can enable automation and speed up operations;
• Cloud platforms that give you the flexibility to bring to market and scale new customer-facing applications and services quickly and at low cost using rapid application development tools and techniques.

Digital Transformation #4. Know your customers

Leveraging new and emerging technologies to improve your agility is only one side of the coin. But in order to translate your new-found agility into more sales and business growth you need the ability to continually identify gaps in the market and respond ever more quickly to customer needs.

• Ensure you’re active on any channels your prospective customers use. Encourage staff to engage on social media and build strong networks within the sectors your business is targeting. That doesn’t mean simply blasting them with sales and marketing messages. It means building genuine relationships where you listen to and participate in the conversations taking place among those potential customers.This is in order to understand them, their challenges and business needs.
• As well as the human element, there are a growing number of automated cloud services to monitor social media feeds, as well as your own customer data, in order to identify customer sentiment (or at least give you some clues about where you should be focusing).
• Some such tools are based on pure statistical analysis, but increasingly these services incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to uncover hidden trends and insights in an ever-growing mountain of data on customers. Suppliers include IBM, SAS, Lexalytics, RapidMiner and Angoss.

Digital Transformation #5. Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation and continual improvement.

Ultimately, for a digital transformation strategy to succeed it must be seen as an ongoing process of improvement. That will require a culture that keeps innovating and looking for better, faster, cheaper ways of doing things. There is no room for complacency. Digital transformation is not a project in the traditional sense, in that it doesn’t have a completion date or, in the foreseeable future at least, a final destination.

• Encourage staff at all levels, and in all areas of the business, to be talking and thinking about measures or tools that could help improve the way they work, or generate more business.
• Ensure you have the right mechanisms, processes and platforms in place to allow staff to share those ideas and put them into practice quickly without fear of censure should they not work. Experimentation and testing are essential elements of digital transformation
• Continually assess the success of your efforts through formal and informal feedback mechanisms and data analysis.

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Originally published at blog.100tb.com.