Digital transformation strategy: 5 most important pillars

Digital transformation is essential for businesses of any size to stay relevant and competitive in today’s market. Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, resulting in fundamental changes in how a business operates and the value they deliver to their customers. A successful digital transformation requires a strong foundation by creating the right culture in the company and a strong vision translated into a clear set of digital initiatives across the organization. In this article, I have given here a birds eye view of the five essential foundation pillars that midsize or Larger enterprise CIO/CDO/CTOs must address to accelerate their organization’s digital transformation initiatives.

The Customer Experience:

Customers are at the core of every digital transformation, mainly personalizing the digital customer experience. Creating customer journey maps is a great technique to show the key touch points and helps us for a deeper understanding of which customers are directly or indirectly impacted by the change. Journey maps also help provide a clear vision of the recommendations that can improve the customer experience with a go-to-market service framework. There are different types of customer journey maps, and they all can help you improve the customer experience. Current digital trends like instant service, seamless omnichannel experience and constant online availability that are helping businesses to bring their customers closer and personalize their customer experience. 

Digital Leadership and Culture: 

One of the biggest factors in digital transformation strategy will be successful is the thought-leadership behind it. Changing the way an organization operates requires leadership, teamwork and emotional intelligence. It also requires strong, efficient communication and courage. The digital leadership begins with the Chief Digital Officer along with the HR team who must spearhead the development of a digital transformation culture that should be more collaborative and customer-centric. So we need to understand how to prepare for cultural change within the organization that supports innovation and digital change is created from a blend of capable digital tools with employee support. 

Operational Agility:

Operational agility is the ability of a company to flex and adapt its operations, technology and information to constantly evolving business requirements brought on by market dynamics, competitive pressures and business turbulence. Operational agility is achieved through digital transformation of systems, processes and workflows. Being able to maintain operational agility is a priority in the New Normal, so businesses should leverage integrated technologies that nurture this agility. A digital transformation framework should focus on accelerating processes, freeing up the workforce to maximize their unique talents, and phasing out slow or complex legacy systems.

Workforce Empowerment:

Digital transformation primarily empowers employees to perform more meaningful and challenging activities. It is a cultural shift, So it's very important to get the workforce to understand the mission of the company and the reasons behind the digital transformation. Digital Transformation can enable a unified and consistent experience for people to access systems, services, data, and apps from anywhere and automates operations like onboarding processes without helpdesk-tickets to improve efficiencies. A well optimized digital workspace is a boon for businesses, improves employee journey and experiences as digitally empowered employees have greater potential to better serve customers. 

Digital Technology Foundation:

We need to lay out technology foundations in the form of digital platforms and innovative technologies like 5G, AI, IoT, RPA, Industry 4.0, Blockchain and Metaverse are playing a crucial role in driving the digital transformation across various industries. Data is the key to driving accurate business decisions, So we need to focus on using technologies that allow the digital team to extract value and insights from various datasets. Choosing the technology track of a digital transformation roadmap focuses on building an integrated information infrastructure. This track creates a foundation for integrating data across silos and enables all information management platforms to interact, allowing for data analytics to drive growth.

The article has been written by Dr Rabi who is currently working as a CTO at Crayon India, Bangalore