How to Plan Your Digital Transformation Roadmap
Digital transformation is the use of digital technologies by a business to improve the way it operates and provides value to consumers. This process can dramatically change a company’s culture, and is often intended to foster an environment of greater experimentation and innovation. Digital transformation has become an essential strategy for businesses of all sizes and their teams to stay relevant and competitive in an increasingly digital world.
Why a Digital Transformation Roadmap Is Important
Without a process and plan, your digital transformation efforts can lead you to implement new systems that don’t actually add value to your company. A roadmap ensures that you know your status and what needs to be done. Transformations on a large scale are difficult; with a roadmap, you can divide the exercise into easily manageable parts.
Implement Steps in the Correct Order
Digital transformation includes a mix of process adjustments to meet evolving needs, organizational changes like the addition of new team members, and technology projects such as moving to the cloud. These elements rely on one another for success. For instance, you cannot change staff levels to benefit from automation until you have implemented the technology. Similarly, technology projects need to be coordinated with changes in business processes.
If you’re leading a digital transformation initiative, you should understand the entire sequence of events in order to transition smoothly and avoid confusion. You should design your roadmap so that separate teams can take care of different transformation steps, yet stay aligned on the overall objective.
Keep Separate Teams Aligned
Digital transformation projects can excite your employees and company and create energy and enthusiasm as teams venture into new zones. However, individual efforts need to be coordinated and controlled to avoid duplication and needless conflict.
By giving team members a process and plan, you can channel their talents in constructive ways. A roadmap offers a reference point and common direction to assist your firm to decide what initiatives and projects to undertake.
Stay Flexible When Facing Unexpected Challenges
Sometimes, operational concerns may take importance over your company’s digital transformation objectives. For example, issues like limited budget or lack of expertise can delay or prevent a key step in your digital transformation strategy. A roadmap can help you make educated decisions about trade-offs and empower your teams to redirect their energies accordingly, so that your organization keeps moving on its digital transformation route.
In short, a roadmap can keep your teams focused and avoid distractions. It can act as a filter to enable them to figure out what is essential. Otherwise, they may follow unimportant goals that could lead to wasted resources, lost time, and dead ends.
Who is Responsible for Planning a Digital Transformation?
Many companies have created the role of a CDO (Chief Digital Officer) who is responsible for all things digital. This position is increasingly crucial, as CIOs (Chief Information Officers) may not have the time to concentrate on transformation projects. Therefore, if you’re really serious about digital transformation, your firm should appoint a CDO or grant an existing manager the authority of a CDO.
Responsibilities of a Chief Digital Officer
A CDO can help you drive your company’s digital growth and convert its processes into simplified and streamlined workflows by using SaaS platforms, tools, and technologies. A CDO’s responsibilities include:
- Creating and deploying well-defined digital strategies
- Coordinating with company executives to launch digital initiatives and capabilities
- Working with different teams to produce creative solutions for customer experiences, marketing channels, services, products, and business processes
- Tracking and reporting KPIs for the ROI of digital investments and projects
- Handling data governance policies
- Working with the HR department to hire and retain proven digital talent to improve the organization’s digital capabilities
A CDO ideally has good accountability, soft skills, and an established record of handling transformation. The person should be able to balance business and tech management skills to provide effective technical solutions to achieve business goals.
Identifying Key Objectives for a Digital Transformation
Your company needs to understand what it will gain by implementing transformation initiatives. The following objectives are common high-level objectives of a digital transformation roadmap.
Enhance service quality
Service enhancement can help meet customer needs, which can positively impact profits.
Improve team collaboration
Consolidating organizational data in a single cloud source is the most common way that teams achieve this goal.
Improve processes
Enable your teams to work more efficiently and hand off work between departments more easily.
Boost efficiency
Modern technology can help make workflows slicker, faster, and repeatable.
Enable your company to be more agile
Digital transformation can help businesses become more flexible to meet changing customer demands.
Produce new, more effective business models
Technology improvements can drive disruption and help to create new business models.
Minimize expenses
Well-designed AI can execute repeated manual tasks and enable companies to save money by reducing headcount.
Enhance staff performance
Communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams can improve productivity in big organizations.
Meet data security standards
With most conventional tools now getting digital interfaces, security has become vital to prevent hackers from accessing systems and data.
Maintain your competitive advantage
By improving process efficiencies through digital transformation, your company can gain an edge over competitors.
Enable your organization to concentrate on its core competencies
Digital transformation offers opportunities for organizations to decide what is important for their business so that they can focus on the essential aspects.
Planning a Digital Transformation
To achieve digital transformation success you need an effective plan and process. You can use the following steps to plan your digital transformation strategy. As an example, let’s assume that your company is planning to shift its processes to the cloud.
Define your goals
First, be clear about what you want from the effort. Identify your company’s strategic gaps, how you can utilize cloud technology to assist your staff, and the challenges faced by your team in doing their tasks.
What type of customer experience do you wish to deliver? How can cloud initiatives help you meet their evolving expectations and needs? Think of these questions both in terms of qualitative impact and their effect on your organization’s bottom line.
Get support from leaders
Research indicates that companies that employed a CDO were 1.6 times likelier to achieve digital transformation success. This is because a CDO acts as a central source of knowledge regarding the digital transformation process and can easily update company leadership on the progress that’s being made.
It’s critical to get the support of your leaders in order to successfully migrate your business to the cloud. Having a dedicated advocate in the organization makes that much easier.
Concentrate on company culture
Apart from the leaders, it’s also vital to get all your team members on board. Educate them on the needs and benefits of cloud adoption so they can understand this vision. Your initiative may require a minor or major change to the organization’s culture, but try to make employees aware of the benefits that will follow.
Gather expertise and resources
Digital transformation requires technical and operational expertise, and you need to put together a team of specialists for the task. You can opt to hire a technology partner, outsource the work, or select members from within the company. The team members should have specific qualities like openness to ideas and new technologies like cloud platforms, and willingness to adjust to changing business needs.
Select suitable technology
There are numerous providers, solutions, and systems available, but are they appropriate for your requirements? If you don’t take the time to consider your actual needs before implementing a new technology, you can face digital burnout resulting in wasted money and time.
Therefore, before you invest in new cloud technology, ask if the solution aligns with your firm’s digital transformation goals. Does it fulfill an organizational gap? If the answer is yes, cloud technology can play an important role in the transformation strategy.
Evaluate likely tradeoffs
Your digital transformation strategy may force you to face tradeoffs like temporary disruptions in business processes, higher costs due to investments in technology and a greater number of employees, and impacted business continuity. Therefore, it’s essential to devise a proper plan to avoid or minimize these effects.
Mileposts and deadlines
To progress on the right track, your roadmap for digital transformation should have intermediate targets that you should look to achieve. These mileposts can enable you to monitor and measure progress. Additionally, they can set expectations about work environment changes and ways to assess the value created by digital transformation.
If your initiatives are planned as a long-term project (roughly three months or more), it’s advisable to plan normalization periods to avoid the negative effects of continuous change.
Key Steps in a Digital Transformation
Effective digital transformation can help your company make informed decisions and increase profitability through automation. Modern technology can help you quickly deliver new services and products to meet the changing customer needs.
The following template gives you a basic understanding of how to structure your digital transformation roadmap:
- Be clear about what you consider a successful transformation.
- Divide the change into easily manageable sections.
- Don’t wait till the end to assess impact; instead, try to derive value as you proceed.
- Concentrate on the effects on people (organizational change, skills, process, and culture).
- Adjust the course direction if needed, as the environment will change continuously.
If you are new to digital transformation, Crowdbotics’ managed app development services are a great option for comprehensive digital transformation managed by industry experts. Get in touch with us today for a comprehensive assessment of your organization’s digital transformation needs.
Originally published on the Crowdbotics Blog October 20, 2020.
