Business technologies have evolved at a rapid-fire rate over the 21st century. With more specialised industry equipment, networking technologies, innovations like AI, and business software offerings available than ever before, business owners have their work cut out for them when it comes to selecting the digital transformation essentials that are best suited to their enterprises.
But there’s more to digital transformation than just swapping out the old for the new. Integrating new technologies into your operational processes also means staff training, risk analyses, customer-facing process improvements, and many more factors that must be considered to ensure a smooth transition for staff and clients alike.
Continue reading to learn how businesses can map out their digital transformation roadmap, and why influential leaders must understand the fundamentals of rapidly advancing digital tools like cloud computing to make their business ‘future-proof’.
Gauge Your Readiness
The first thing you should seek to do is determine your current digital readiness. Doing so will include both logistical and implementational concerns. Let’s start with the logistics.
Naturally, investing in new technological assets for your business will mean amending your business contents insurance cover accordingly. After all, you want to make sure that all your new equipment will be safeguarded by your business insurance. So before you do anything else, make sure that your insurance provider can provide you with an estimate on your premium and excess if you were to increase the value of your contents insurance cover to account for digital technologies.
Now, let’s look at implementation. Identifying your current digital status will help you discern your enterprise’s strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. This can, in turn, help you determine what technological investments are a top priority, and which ones you may be able to invest in down the line.
Start by looking at your existing infrastructure. Could it handle the increased demands if you decide to maximise your business’ operational hours or expand into new markets? How do your current systems’ age and scalability stack up? Do you have the required network and storage capacities to support current and future demands? Answering these questions now can help you easily identify areas for improvement and perhaps even understand earlier on what the best solutions will be. As an example, businesses that rely heavily on client contracts pay their teams to spend a large part of the day completing mundane tasks to change templates and verify information.
With contract management software (CMS), these steps are automated, freeing staff up to work on more complex issues, including the client relationship aspect of the business. The right CMS gives clients access to a dedicated portal for document viewing and sharing, offers retainer customization, generates automatic retainer invoices, and much more. For more information on how contract management software works, see this article by Accelo.
Then there’s the evergreen concern of data. In the digital age, your data management and storage capability is the lifeblood of your business. So to make space for more technologies and software, assess how you currently collect, store, and manage your business data. Is your data easily accessible across all departments, and do you have enough analytics competencies? Lots of companies are implementing SAN storage that helhelps simplify data management and store large amounts of data, so make sure to look into this type of storage solution if you haven’t already. This approach helps your business to free up the time of capable IT staff so that they can focus on other operational areas that require their attention more.
An adjacent discussion is whether your current staff and culture can adapt. Are your leadership and staff inclined to embrace the new mindset and processes? Gauge the level of digital understanding within your organisation, whether there is resistance to change, and decide how you will address this resistance in the transition from your old operational processes to your new, digital-era methods.
Improve Customer Platforms First
Paramount to any major shift in operations is how the changes will impact your company’s consumer experience. Here, assess how your organisation currently interacts with the public through existing digital channels – this will include your business website, social media channels, and any customer service or CRM interfaces.
All of these assets are vital to elevating your business in the digital age – just so long as they’re satisfying to use and actually meet customer needs. If there are any areas where your company’s customer-facing processes are in need of reassessment and redesign, then make this a priority for your digital transformation efforts. In other words, identify areas where digital improvements might improve consumer satisfaction and loyalty.
Another component that’s also worth considering is the size of your organisation and the estimated flexibility with scalability that you’ll need from these customer-facing assets. Obviously, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for every enterprise. Each business is unique, after all, and not all businesses will require a presence on each social platform, nor will they need terabytes of storage or an overseas call centre to answer their phones or manage web inquiries during non-peak hours. Knowing what capacity you’ll need to design your systems to maintain can be a great way to keep your digital transformation costs modest from the get-go, ensuring that you can keep capital on hand for future investments.
Tools for Transformation
Now for the fun part: what tech tools should you be investing in to shape your business’ digital transformation from the ground up? Well here are just two key emerging areas to focus on.
AI and ML
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are two emerging technologies that are currently breaking boundaries around the globe. They are enabling our computers to be even more efficient, learning from data, and letting businesses automate mundane tasks.
For businesses of all sizes, embracing automation can be a great method for boosting the scalability of your enterprise without having to allocate time and money for managing these often mundane tasks. Some great examples of tasks that can easily be handled using business automation include administrative tasks (like inquiry collection and invoicing) and even lead generation for growing your business.
Cloud Computing
Using hardware resource pools, service providers can chunk up storage and processing power into scalable pieces that individuals and businesses can lease instead of purchasing their own systems. The ability to manage off-site data centres helps businesses stay agile, reducing overhead costs in a similar fashion to automation, and ensuring that start-ups and smaller businesses can scale just as freely as larger corporations across the globe.
Of course, there are several more exciting fields, like blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing, which, depending on your business, may play a vital role in your business operations in the very near future. Our best advice is to stay current on these topics and decide whether they can address your challenges down the line.
Steps to Success
Use these steps to steer your organisation towards a brighter, digitally aware future.
Step 1 – Define Your Business Transformation Goals
What does a technically up-to-date version of your company look like? Define any relevant and achievable goals that align with your business objectives.
Step 2 – Conduct an Exhaustive Review
Use the insights from your readiness assessment and customer standpoint discussions to identify strengths and weakness areas. Once complete, this info will help derive a strategy and prioritise milestones.
Step 3 – Engage Stakeholders
Implementing organisational change in any capacity will naturally require the support of your staff at a very minimum. But for large-scale transformation changes, you’ll also want the full support of your company’s major stakeholders. Be sure to get them all involved early to foster enthusiasm and overcome resistance from the get-go.
Step 4 – Invest Accordingly
Now it’s time to put your money to work! At this stage, ensure your chosen technology aligns with your organisation’s size, niche, industry, and consumer base as you go about your rollout and implementation.
Step 5 – Build An Innovative Workplace Culture
The new processes are here, and your staff should be open to not only using them but innovating with them independently. Encourage everyone on your team to embrace the agility that’s been made possible thanks to your digital transformation initiatives. Building up this forward-thinking workplace culture is vital for the success of your company’s transformation.
Step 6 – Invest in Staff Training Initiatives
Accordingly, you must provide training programs to help your staff develop the new digital literacy skills required for effectively utilising their new workplace technologies. Designing the right staff training and onboarding initiatives here can help ensure that your digital transformation infrastructure is solidified as a fixture of your business’ operational processes.
Why Digital Transformation Matters
It’s not just business technologies that are evolving – it’s also consumer technologies. And as your customers become more accustomed to certain standards from business tech offerings or digital presences, your company will need to keep up to stay competitive.
Take the example of eCommerce alone. Today, consumers expect 24/7 response times for problem reporting, shipping statuses, and human-provided customer service, though they don’t mind if automated systems like chatbots can solve their issues. Today’s savvy customers also expect a certain level of resiliency when companies face service interruptions. Everyone finds themselves with less free time than ever, and thus, it’s not good business practice to keep folks waiting on the phone or deliver bad news like intruders gaining access to sensitive information.
Beyond customer service issues, effective digital transformation means being agile enough to experiment with new processes, bring new products to market quickly and collect enough data to evaluate whether your ideas translate to actual results, such as more customers and an increased profit margin.
Simply put, while it’s about staying current with available technology, it’s also about reconsidering how we do business in an always-on, global economy. You can keep your business ready to respond and grow by staying ahead of the tech curve. That’s what makes digital transformation initiatives a must for any future-oriented organisation.