Why Digital Transformation Can’t Wait Till You Are Ready?

Digital transformation has been a buzzword dominating boardroom discussions in the last decade. Today, Digital transformation has enabled companies to reimagine their business models, shift their operations online where needed and leverage technology to improve efficiency, streamline processes, and enhance customer experiences. No surprise that the global digital transformation market is expected to grow from $469.8 billion to $ 1 trillion by 2025.

Digitalization is a complex subject many enterprises try to put off or delay. This hesitation may stem from concerns about employee resistance to change or a need for in-house expertise to manage the transformation process. However, delaying digital adoption until the “perfect” moment or until feeling entirely prepared is an error. Technological advancements are evolving rapidly, and the longer one waits to embrace digital transformation, the more difficult it becomes to keep up. As per a July 2022 report by Accenture, 64% of consumers wish companies would respond faster to meet their changing needs. Instead of waiting for companies to meet their expectations, they will move toward the ones that have already transformed to build optimum digital experiences.

Moving the dial with timely digital transformation

Digital transformation is no longer an option but a necessity in today’s business world. COVID-19 accelerated the need for organizations to adopt digital technologies to remain competitive, efficient, and relevant in a rapidly evolving landscape. Those who fail to embrace it risk falling behind and losing to competitors who have already shifted to digital.

With constant changes in customer expectations, the technologies that were effective yesterday may need to deliver better experiences tomorrow. Businesses must match pace with the whirlwind speed of digital transformation to keep their success and growth sustainable. They must be familiar with where it is heading and invest in it before it leaves them feeling winded for survival.

How to shape business digitalization now 

Enterprises must adopt disruptive technologies to start or accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. At a broader level, though, this process is an evolution that necessitates a cultural shift in workplaces. When the culture is focused on growth, it changes the definition of “business as usual” forever. Besides working on calculations of investments and projected ROI, a company may have to recruit new talent for change and implement specific policies that help it to boost productivity, save time and improve data security. Although Digital transformation can bring numerous benefits to businesses, many companies still need to learn to implement it with a value-centric mindset. Following industry best practices before embarking on a digital transformation journey is essential to ensure success. Here are seven that can make or break your DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION journey.

Prioritizing customer needs: By putting the customer at the center of digital transformation efforts, companies can better understand their needs, preferences, and behaviors and deliver personalized and seamless experiences across channels. This drives customer satisfaction and loyalty and can lead to increased revenue and profitability. By incorporating customer feedback and data into their digital strategy, businesses can ensure that their Digital transformation efforts align with customer expectations and deliver the kind of value that customers genuinely care about.

Having clear business cases: Pegging digital transformation to specific business cases helps to make it more relevant. By clearly understanding the business value and ROI of Digital transformation initiatives, companies can better prioritize investments and allocate resources effectively. Additionally, well-drafted business cases can help align stakeholders across the organization and ensure everyone is working towards a common goal. Organizations can deliver the expected results with clear business cases and a business-value-centric focus, saving time, resources, and investment. Engaging with an experienced partner who can understand, contextualize, strategize, architect, pilot, and put together compelling business cases helps

3Choosing the right tools: Another factor determining the success of digital transformation initiatives is the choice of technologies to support business processes, workflows, and projects undertaken. With the right tools, companies can automate processes, streamline workflows, and improve collaboration and team collaboration. It is essential to choose tools aligned with the organization’s digital strategy, address specific pain points, and support scalability and future growth. A safe approach would be gradually replacing legacy systems and aligning tech to business goals. Using professional help from experienced partners for cloud transformation, advanced analytics, AI-ML, and hyper-automation is also worthwhile.

Involving employees: Tenured employees working in different business units have a better idea of their workflow obstacles, broken processes, and missing information for specific tasks. They can share their views on improving existing practices and where to deploy new technologies for quick returns on investment. When employees are engaged in the planning and implementation stages for digitalization, it also increases their likelihood of adopting new technologies. As some of them become acclimatized to digitally evolved processes, they can also help to train others for the job.

Putting data to work: Siloed information impedes smooth workflows. Once digital transformation becomes a priority, building a single storehouse of data that offers visibility in operations and simplifies customer relationship management is essential. Data governance for digital transformation helps to ensure that the processes implemented by a business are synced to its goals. Organizations may need to adopt systems like AWS DataZone or Microsoft Purview to fortify their data management. Also, data-based insights enable businesses to work progressively on successive digitization projects.

Leveraging agile methodologies involves continuously innovating by upgrading business models and functions with small, iterative steps and allocating resources. Agile methods enable companies to update their digitalization strategies and respond quickly to market demands, addressing technical challenges while developing new products and releasing them frequently to receive timely feedback for future versions. Agile transformation is a test-and-learn process prioritizing collaboration, cross-functional teamwork, self-organization, and quality over traditional rules. It encourages users to experiment, remain flexible, and take controlled risks to stay ahead in the rapidly changing digital landscape.

Measuring success: When a business fuels its digital transformation process, it must also define and envisage the value the new changes will bring. There should be clear parameters to track and assess the value derived from restructuring, including higher productivity, improved operational efficiencies, superior quality of products and services, better customer experiences, more robust relationships with stakeholders, and cost savings. Analyzing such outcomes regularly with the right KPIs is vital to measure the ROI of digitalization.

At YASH, digital transformation involves a programmatic organization-business-needs-aligned approach and multiple technologies, platforms, and skillsets. We partner with global tech leaders, including Microsoft, SAP, AWS, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Oracle, to help enterprises invest in systems that empower and maximize value.

• Digital adoption
• Digital Transformation
• digitalization