A guide to digital transformation
Get your processes ready for a digital transformation. This guide includes tips for a successful, effective digital transformation that will improve the customer experience, organisational performance, resource management and more.
What does digital transformation mean?
A bit like a business transformation, this is where you holistically improve your services or business through the adoption of digital technology. This could be through replacing or enhancing your existing processes with newer technology.
Digital transformation is on the operational plans of most organisations and has undoubtedly been accelerated by the COVID19 pandemic. Many organisations have had to deploy an effective virtual workforce and new systems at breakneck speed to help cope with the challenges of remote working.
Ensure your digital transformation brings improvements
Digital technologies can be a powerful enabler of improvement in any organisation. What is critical is that any investment of time or money on digital technology should yield an improvement, otherwise you risk wasting resources and achieving little more than rearranging the corporate deckchairs, or possibly even making your services worse. Improvement, however, can mean many things. Below are some of the benefits that you can expect from an effective digital transformation:
More comprehensive and efficient data collection
Better performance insights
Reduced costs, through redeployment and reinvestment of resources
Improved organisational performance (especially efficiency & productivity)
Better customer experiences
Improved resource management
Increased business agility
Remember, if you can’t tie your digital transformation back to an improvement driver then you really need to question why you are spending money and time on it in the first place.
Ad Esse Consulting’s tips for a successful digital transformation
Integrate your digital transformation into your organisational strategy, ensuring you have clear drivers, goals and success measures in place.
Your digital transformation needs to adopt an enabler mindset, one whereby the digital technologies are there to better facilitate your organisational functions, not dictate them.
You need a clear and documented understanding of how organisational processes will work once the new technology is in place. It is more costly to make process changes once new technology is implemented, so make sure your processes are optimised before the technology is implemented.
Check that your digitally enabled process will deliver an improved customer and employee experience.
Carefully scope what the digital technology is there to do and what it is not to do. Don’t become distracted by additional functionality and new features, they need the same scrutiny as the core technology you intend to implement.
Ensure your leaders are briefed on what the technology will do, and what the expectation is regarding its use in their area of the organisation. Doing this will ensure your leaders can role model the expected behaviours and properly support their teams.
Adopt an agile mindset towards implementation. Implementation of new technology rarely runs exactly to plan, using a methodology that can adapt your implementation to emerging requirements will ensure that new technology will best support your end users.
Just as we recommend when reviewing or redesigning processes, involve the people that will be using the new technology when understanding the requirements, when designing how it will work, in testing and in the implementation and rollout.
If you need any help with getting your processes ready for a digital transformation, get in touch. Email hello@ad-esse.com.
