Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
The bells are tolling, 2020 with all the good, the bad, and the ugly, is just strokes away. What strategies do you have in place? How have you planned for 2021?
Do you have quality leadership? How are you planning towards updating your employees’ skills? If all these are in place, you have the opportunity of using digital transformation to drive improved revenues and customer satisfaction in 2021 and beyond.
Digital transformation has come to stay, and you must adopt it to drive a meaningful economic recovery and improvement in 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic brought into focus the need for brands to accelerate digital initiatives which led to improved efficiencies and ensured that work-from-home was carried on at scale.
Though there are efforts to combat the virus through the provision of vaccines from health organizations, there is still a great need for collaborative technologies. The reason for this is that you still need to use the benefits of digital transformation to achieve expanded efficiencies and gain valuable insights.
If you have good strategies and skilled hands, you can use digital transformation to enhance high performance in your brand. You, however, need to ensure that the following are in place for a good result.
1. Make sure you have the right leaders in place
Having the right leaders in place is central to a successful digital transformation. Leadership is instrumental to having a vision and a roadmap that your brand will work with.
If the brand’s decision-makers do not have an adequate understanding of both the business and digital technologies, they will become a wedge to any transformational idea the brand has. With insightful leaders, your team will understand what everybody has to do to achieve the brand’s common goal.
Where it’s necessary, you may even have to make use of external partners, this will ensure you don’t have to go through bottlenecks that come with the departmental hierarchy to adopt new digital technologies.
2. Re-strategize when the need arises
If you believe that digital transformation is all about what your IT team sees as the vision of what technologies to implement, then you are not ready yet. The objective is to constantly transform to ensure your brand delivers a differentiated product or service to the global market.
The expectation from IT leaders is to amply demonstrate how their strategy falls in line with the brand’s growth projections. This is because technological innovation is taking a quantum leap, so IT strategies must be dynamic.
At worst, any IT strategy must take into consideration disruptions that may occur within three to five years. It will be very helpful to have a program in place that ensures your strategy is reviewed from time to time to enhance a successful digital transformation.
Instead of viewing caution as a position of weakness, the fact that you are nimble and adaptable depicts a position of strength and is integral to a successful strategy.
3. Ensure your data is at work
To initiate digital transformation, you may need to analyze large amounts of structured and unstructured data. The essence is to afford your organization valuable insights that you will use to come up with digitization priorities, strategies, automation, as well as to improve workflows.
Apart from reporting and process improvements which you can use to measure how far you are going with your digital transformation, you may need to incorporate big data as well as IoT data from a range of devices, phones, and machine sensors. This allows you to extend your automation process across all operations. You will also be able to drive new efficiencies and business models.
A plus from digital transformation is the ability to listen to customer voices and respond in near real-time. You will also have the opportunity of using predictive analytics to predict their pain points.
4. You must have a formidable team
Some brands make use of the cloud to ensure cost is saved when embarking on digital transformation, while this is a good step for the brand, the truth is that without the requisite knowledge to enhance a strong process-oriented problem-solving team, it may all end in futility.
Whatever you do, ensure that you have an expert working with somebody who has an intrinsic knowledge of your business workflow on any project. There are no hard rules for embarking on digital transformation, however, the desired outcome should be the focus, and you can only achieve this if you have a versatile team.
5. Focus on the yardstick to evaluate your success
Even though the COVID-19 pandemic has affected how most brands work, it’s evident that remote working is tilting the scale towards digital transformation. With most of your employees having to connect from different locations, you must ensure seamless means of communication.
This does not, however, mean that you blindly inject funds. While some brands may have to cut costs due to the ravages of the pandemic, the decision of funding digital transformation is something you must think seriously about.
It will be a bad idea if, for the reason of embarking on digital transformation, you inject funds and in the end, you cannot run the organization successfully. A yardstick to measure digital transformation success is the ability to evaluate the value of the initiatives to ensure optimized returns on investments.
