Why is the world after Digital Transformation and what the heck it’s all about?
What is Digital Transformation?
Enterprises spend billions of dollars in digital transformation initiatives to apply digital capabilities to improve efficiencies, increase customer value and create new monetization opportunities. It is an enterprise-wide fundamental cultural, organizational and operational change of businesses model enhancing customer value delivery through digital technologies. In a nutshell, it is all about digitizing information, improving processes for business to successfully compete in digital world using smart technology.
Why is Digital Transformation needed?
Digital Transformation is essential for businesses to survive in this fast-changing world. Ultimate benefits are:
· Smart technology and connected systems.
· Business process automation — Eliminate time consuming manual processes.
· Improved efficiency & productivity — Maximizing output, minimizing waste.
· Improved & efficient decision-making through real-time data collection.
· Increased flexibility and scalability.
· Optimized operations.
· Enhanced reliability & reduced risks.
· Achieve significant cost savings.
· Employee empowerment.
· Stellar customer experience.
· Keeps pace with business competition.
· Achieve your business goal with improved profitability.
Characteristics of Digital Transformation
Where to start?
Don’t start until you find out where you want to end up. The planning starts with thorough understanding of the current state of your business. Transformation needs a purpose. Get inputs from customers and users. Don’t get caught up on what your competitions do, pay attention to what they don’t. Plan your Digital Transformation keeping customers in mind.
Who are the players in Digital Transformation?
How to succeed in Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is a step-by-step evolution and not a revolution. Transformation is a process that takes time, needs change, different thinking and willingness to change. We need to build strong pillars and execution strategy to effectively lead a successful transformation.
· Identify business strategy.
· Develop your vision and gather support.
· Establish a baseline before transformation.
· Design customer experience.
· Understand size, scope and benefits well.
· Estimate cost and timeline.
· Establish a strong Program Governance.
· Prioritize important segments.
· Clearly establish guiding principles.
· Assemble a winning “A” team from inside the organization.
· Recognize employees’ fear of being replaced.
· Overcome obstacles and resisting employees.
· Fail Fast — there will be lot of learning throughout the journey.
· Communicate early, effectively and accurately.
· Organizational Change Management.
· Plan and execute marketing strategy for promoting the transformation.
· Build a stellar support system that promotes wide-spread user adoption.
· Measure the effectiveness of the transformation.
· Gain rapid wins and show sustained results.
Successful Digital Transformations Examples
Streaming giant Netflix moved away from physical DVD business model to cloud based digital platform that made millions of contents available a click away. They grew from less than a million subscriber in 2002 to more than 180 million subscribers in 2020.
Amazon, once a mail order bookstore is now the world’s largest online retailer and AWS is the world largest cloud platform provider. It would not have been possible without their constant Digital Transformation right from the beginning.
Blockbuster and Circuit City are classic examples of businesses which missed the Digital Transformation train because of which, they don’t exist today.
