An ideal Digital Transformation should bring effective changes in the processes and procedures of the business model to help organisations deliver superior customer experiences.
Digital transformations are often considered only from the prism of technology change. To achieve desirable results, companies must approach the process from a holistic and all-inclusive perspective. This entails firms attributing significance to the process, business model, and cultural transformation besides integrating digital devices and technology in their business processes.
Digital Transformation: Importance of Roadmap
Digital transformation is a journey that each and every organisation today is eager to embark on. Faced with fast-changing business scenarios, companies have fully realised the importance of the process to deliver better value and customer experiences. Digital transformation is a multifaceted concept and its execution in a company requires coordinated efforts centred around digital devices, technologies, techniques and procedures.
To successfully achieve digital transformation, the role and importance of a roadmap couldn’t be overemphasised. A clearly framed roadmap can help to smooth out the implementation challenges by breaking down the entire process into small manageable tasks. This, in turn, will help in the proper planning, allocation of resources, and mapping results on digital transformation. The roadmap will also enable different teams of the company to work in a cohesive manner and avoid confusion while executing organisational-wide digital transformation.
Three critical elements of a Digital Transformation Roadmap
Depending upon the size, scale, and offerings of the company, the nature and requirements of digital transformation will vary across businesses and industries. That said, a few critical components are common and their adoption will help firms manage their entire journey of digital transformation smoothly. Here are the details:
- Digital Vision Statement: An organisation must put out an inspiring vision statement to encapsulate its digital transformation efforts. Further, top management should ensure that the statement is communicated throughout the organisation and resonates with every stakeholder of the company.
- Implementation Strategy: The primary aspects of consideration while developing an implementation strategy include fixing the time frame to complete transformation, the magnitude of changes required, and critical areas of improvements which need urgent attention among others.
- Defining Targets and Mapping Key Activities: Digital transformation roadmap must include settings of milestones and comprehensive evaluations of all strategically important processes, their alternatives, and cost/benefit analysis to assess their value for the existing business model.
Four Tracks of a Digital Transformation Roadmap
In order to successfully achieve digital transformation, organisations must focus on the following four tracks:
- People Track - Any successful digital transformation must result in delivering superior customer value and experiences. Along with customers, the organisation must also focus on its employees, partners, and other stakeholders so that efforts of the entire ecosystem come together to offer superior value propositions to the target market.
- Process Track - organisations must focus on the product life cycle and scalability potential of the existing business model. These evaluations will lead to insightful information and help the company strategize better on the key components of segmentation, targeting, and positioning.
- Technology Track - Integration of the data silos in order to create a comprehensive, exchangeable platform of information is at the heart of Technology Track
- Content Track - Striving for cohesive and integrated communication across messaging and media campaigns makes for an ideal content Track strategy
Three Approaches To Digital Transformation
As far as approaches to digital transformation are concerned, organisations can choose from the three available options:
- Incremental,
- Holistic, and
- Hybrid
The first one entails the execution in an incremental manner while the second one goes for the full-throttle approach, advocating digital experimentation at the organisation-wide level. The third approach is a mixed method and involves a combination of both incremental and holistic approaches to digital transformation.
Four Essential Pillars of Digital Transformation
For a digital transformation to succeed, it has to have the support of four essential pillars:
- Start Small - The first pillar advocates starting at a small level though firms must learn quickly so that the efforts on digital transformations can be scaled quickly
- Empower Employees - The second pillar is the empowerment of the workforce and encouraging them to take digital initiatives for achieving greater success in digital initiatives
- Keep up the pace - Training employees to quickly adopt digital platforms is the key to keeping up the pace with fast-changing realities on the digital front, the third pillar of successful digital transformation. This is essential as the breakneck speed of innovation mandates organisations to quickly implement a digital transformation or else face the risk of extinction from the market.
- Connect the digital supply chain - The fourth and last pyramid of digital transformation is to combine the existing technology stack of the organisation with new digital technologies so that the overall level of disruption can be contained within the tolerable limits of abruptness.
Conclusion
Designing and executing the entire lifecycle of Digital transformation is a complex process and requires an all-encompassing approach. Organisations aspiring for a successful digital transformation must work simultaneously on many fronts - they need to define their digital goals, talk to their customers and employees about transformation, take into confidence their suppliers and partners, and critically evaluate the deficiencies in their legacy systems. In addition, the issues and challenges related to the integration of new digital tools and technologies, measurement and analysis of the results, and reviewing the outcomes also need to be deliberated in detail to transform the company in a true digital manner.
The article has been written by Rohit Yadava, Chief Operating Officer, MSys Technologies