Digital Transformation — why bother?

Why is digital transformation so important? After all, isn’t technology fluid and ever-changing with a life cycle that consistently drops every year? Well, digital transformation isn’t about the constant upgrading and updating but is about updating the way your business interacts with technology; it’s about creating a business culture that can integrate technology in the most efficient way possible. By creating a tech-friendly culture at your company you can better upgrade with each wave of tech trends, and stay in the technological zeitgeist, and ultimately, increase efficiency, your company’s brand, and profits.

Some of the best ways to initiate a digital transformation require a lot of planning and picking your points rather than an entire overhaul of your business’ practices. You should first begin with a strong vision and choose what area you want to focus on. Your focus could be on increasing brand awareness, customer-oriented goals, a purely financial objective, such as increasing digital sales, or anything that you believe needs to reach its digital potential. Subsequently, you must assess the current capabilities of the point you’ve chosen. Some of the questions you should ask are, how flexible your current system’s capabilities are, how efficient it is, and does it deliver the anticipated outcomes.

After analyzing the capabilities, then you identify the initiatives that are necessary to initiate the digital transformation. A great example is a large telecommunications company, located in Australia, which underwent its digital transformative journey in 2011. They chose to transform their customer transactions. They found that they could reduce costs if they transitioned their clients from a paper-based system to online transactions. After roughly three years, the digital transactions were not only 40% of their total transactions but grew from 50 million per year to 250 million per year, a 500% growth rate.[1]

To implement such a change is not an easy feat, and to fully apply changes, as they did, you must start slow and be in it for the long-haul. The construction of a healthy, tech-friendly culture is obligatory, and once you implement a roadmap where you pick your targets, analyze the capabilities, and identify the next steps, you will be well on your way to reaching your digital potential.