Customers are the most critical stakeholder in every business venture. In this pacing world of technology, customers expect more from organisations and equipping these services and coping up with their changing desires and tastes is a challenge for all the organisations. The famous Charles Darwin quoted the basic survival of species where neither the strongest nor most important species survives but the one who is most adaptable to changes will survive. This article will provide key pieces of information about digital transformation.
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is a process by which organizations use new digital technologies to improve and reevaluate themselves to meet the varying business requirements. Organizations revisit everything they do internally and conduct other interactive sessions with customers, thus creating a new way of getting business done. Digital transformation is all about customers and how organizations aim at engaging the customers with their new technologies and making their organization much stronger than it was.
An important element of digital transformation is technology. We should know what digital transformation is really capable of and how we can mould the business to adopt these changes efficiently.
Moreover, companies adapt business tactics to succeed in digital transformation. This has brought more importance to customer services. It removes the traditional way of customers approaching the companies and has brought more classic way where customers get to choose which company they would like to put their trust on. Companies try to display their talent and abilities via advertisements and social media has played a sophisticated role in this.
Transformations are hard, Digital ones are harder!
The word ‘digital transformation’ is always dealt with uncertainty. Different companies have their own perspective towards digital transformation and thus they adopt different strategies. As for many companies follow the trend and try to bring out the concept just to keep up in the competition and achieve benefits, they find success baffling. The success rate of digital transformation is found to be very low. Still, many companies look forward to this. In order to avoid the downfall companies should look into the factors that may have a serious impact on their business.
Now we look into the levels of execution of digital transformation and factors that have an influence on the execution of the digital transformation.
Levels of Execution
We have 3 levels of execution
Strategic
Program
Application
The strategic level is considered as the first level of execution of digital transformation where the companies create strategies to implement digital transformation. They evaluate themselves so that they have a better idea about the effect of digital transformation on their company and also discuss the risks they are going to face in the future. There are many factors that play an important role at this level. First of all, all plans require a great leader combined with energy enthusiasm and lots of vision for the future to manage and implement everything. Then secondly companies have to analyze the above strategies and vision and their effect on the organisation and thus implement the right strategies. A company that builds lots of applications would never succeed in the field of digital transformation. What you really need is a mixture of apps that let you run the business efficiently, ensure that they meet customer’s needs and could take up new business parallel to the existing one and manage them efficiently.
In the case of digital transformation companies mainly concentrate on strategies rather than practical execution. It is important for companies to go beyond the strategic level and put a greater effort into implementing it. It deals with more of an architectural or programmatic approach where companies mainly focus on how much budget is to be allocated, how to achieve benefits and prove the return on investments and thus impart throughout the organisation. Now we would discuss the factors that play an important role in this level. First of all, we need a project owner who has the right to take up the strategies and vision to another level and thus make things work in place. Then we need is someone who can relate both business and industrial aspects and thus form a bridge between them. We call them architects and they look into most of the technical aspects and ensure that it happens in an efficient manner. Finally, we need to analyse the budget required and the return on investment.
We have already dealt with strategies and allocating budgets. Next level deals with a practical approach where work really happens. It acts as a bridge between business and information technology. It involves making the most appropriate apps for the organisation in-order to flourish the business and choosing the right skilled people for making them, which forms the team. One of the important factors in this level is the product owner, he is the one who manages all technical aspects and checks on the whole team so that they work on time and efficiently.
In all these levels we find that even though technology plays an important role, your people are the most important assets. They play the most important roles in every level of execution of the digital transformation. They will ultimately determine success or failure in your company. People are the ones who should be able to adapt to the corresponding changes and manage and work accordingly.
Inorder to succeed in digital transformation, companies should ensure that people and processes get along with each other.
