Digital transformation – what does it mean, what should we pay attention to?
Every change is difficult, but managing a company’s digital transformation is maybe even harder.
According to a fresh study, digital transformation is the biggest fear of company managers in 2019. Only 16% of the surveyed corporate leaders said that the digital transformation of their organization had successfully improved their performance and brought sustainable change in the long-term.
In this article we will show you the minimum requirements you need to pay attention to in order to lead your digital transformation project to success.
First of all digital technologies are a good opportunity to increase our operational efficiency, but to successfully implement them, you need to be able to transform your organization and completely rethink your traditional business processes.
Like in many other cases, it is possible if you have the right basics – e.g.: a comprehensive and complex business strategy – to be successful.
What is digital transformation?
In the course of digital transformation we integrate the digital technology into all business activities of a given company, which fundamentally changes the daily operations and customer service processes as well.
It also means a drastic change in corporate culture, experimentation, continuous learning, and a whole new kind of corporate learning ability (that we are not afraid to experiment even if many experiments will result in failure).
In another way of phrasing: “The digital transformation fills the gap between the digital user’s expectations of the modern age and the inappropriate response of the analog corporates.
According to a third framing “digital transformation means a change in corporate governance, a new way of thinking, an innovative corporate culture that creates entirely new digital business models using technology at a higher level to help our company’s employees, customers, suppliers, partners and provide the best possible user experience for its stakeholders”.
What should we pay attention to during a digital transformation project?
1. Have a clear business strategy before you start anything
When introducing the digital transformation – jut like in the case of digital marketing campaigns – most of our customers have a specific digital device in mind that they want to introduce (e.g.: using a chatbot, introducing a marketing automation system, or running trendy Facebook ads), but this misleads the whole process.
Don’t choose a tool but a goal! For example, don’t want to use machine learning. Our goal should be to serve our customers at a higher level. We will start on the right path if we choose the most effective tool for our main goal. Another common case is when a client of ours contacts us by wanting to run Facebook ads. It is only a tool. Let’s define the main goal first and then find the right tool to achieve it!
There is no difference in digital transformation projects: first define our main business strategy and business goal and then select the appropriate tool(s) or solutions to achieve them.
Don’t follow the current trending waves, your goal is not only to have the most fashionable digital marketing tools but to successfully apply the digital solutions that help you to achieve our main goals!
2. Use your internal resources
Most companies opening up to digital transformation line up an entire army of outside consultants who most often pull schema-like solutions onto that company with the exclamation “what is good at X, will be good at Y too”. The right approach to digital transformation is to collect and organize the existing valuable, in-house information that already exists and to involve the key people into the process who really know what works well and what doesn’t.
The introduction of new technologies solely does not increase productivity. This does not depend on the specific technology, but on the fact that key informations – already available within the company – were not taken into account during the implementation.
3. Ask your customers about their customer experiences
No digital transformation project – with the aim to improve the customer experience- can be successful if it does not begin with the use of input data gained during customer interviews.
The clients can be interviewed using either an in-depth interview method or a focus group interview.
Understand your employee’s fears
Digital transformation projects – but even the introduction of a marketing automation system – naturally bring the fear of workers in the affected area that because of the machines they will loose their jobs. It is almost a fact that workers will be resisted by the introduction of digital technologies and they will fight against the installation. In any case we need to understand this kind of fear to manage them in most empathetic way and educate our employees with the right information and also to tell them that their fears are gratuitous.
Digitization and automation basically take over human tasks that consume a lot of resources but can be completely triggered by machines or automatisms. In this case the employees can deal with tasks that really require human intelligence, human intellect and human thinking (for example, a professional marketing automation system will only work as well as the person setting it up, parameterizing and operating it).
4. Acquire the ‘start-up culture’
In the Silicon Valley, USA, the mentioned ‘startup corporate culture’ is characterized by agile decision-making, rapid prototyping, and a flat organizational structures.
The process of digital transformation is basically uncertain: there is constant changing, therefore rapid decision-making is needed, and all business areas of an organization need to be involved in the process. The traditional hierarchical systems can block the process, so the most effective solution may be a flat-structured organizational unit created specifically for this purpose, independent of the rest of the company.
To sum up
Our digital transformation project can only be successful if the business management returns to the basics and acquire the startup concept. The first step is to change the mindset of the company. Before we choose the specific digital solutions and how we will implement them, we have to define our main business strategy and goals.
The business strategy will determine the digital devices, and not reverse!.
Our digital transformation project will only be as successful as our business strategy is – so as in any other case – we must first do our own homework to put digital technology in place to increase our corporate efficiency and improve customer experience and customer service.