Discover The 6 Components Of A Successful DX
Whether you are a small organization or an enterprise, sustaining in the current business climate is a challenge. To address this, investing in new digital technologies will help you optimize business processes. Digital transformation empowers your workforce to excel, enables management to make judicious decisions, and as a whole helps to attain organizational goals.
According to McKinsey, 70% of the digital transformation efforts fail because of poor strategy. This makes it evident that digital transformation involves strategy, just as much as it involves technology and its roll-out. The success of digital transformation relies majorly on people who will use the deployed digital systems.
6 Key Components Of A Successful Digital Transformation
1. Digital-Savvy Leaders
Businesses looking to save money through digitalization should adopt a top-down approach. It is a tried and tested transformation strategy. Those who are at the top should lead by example.
If that isn’t the case, the organization should change the leadership or train them to fill the gap. A business that is led with a strong mindset for transformation and an aptitude for technology usually succeeds and steers its way through the new process.
A digital-savvy leader acts as an engine that can create an environment that is digitally enabled, technologically empowered, and culturally viable. But, here’s something to consider: 35% of the employees think that their CEO is hindering the digital transformation efforts.
And as if that were not shocking enough, more than 55% of employees in emerging companies say they need new leaders who can embrace change and make room for potential failure. This is the reason companies need digital-savvy leaders who can ensure cross-functional teams to encourage an atmosphere where employees from different departments collaborate to achieve a common goal.
A digital-first leader will give the team opportunities to experiment, innovate, and implement ideas, and such an environment inspires growth and success.
2. Communicating Frequently Across The Board
One major component for the success of your digital transformation efforts is communication. During the planning and strategizing stage, management often ignores communication. It is one of the important ingredients that will ensure that your efforts are successful.
It is well-known that during major roll-outs, despite having a proper strategy in place, people tend to confuse their role. This only happens because each employee is different and their perceptions also vary, unless your communication leaves no scope for misunderstandings.
Incorporating an omnichannel communication strategy will drastically improve the success rate of your DT initiatives. You can use channels such as one-on-one meetings, video conferencing, email, messaging apps, and in-app announcements. This will help ensure that information you wish to share across the organization is on-point. Knowing which channel of communication serves best for what type of message is also crucial.
3. Enabling The Workforce For The Future
The phrase "workforce of the future" may sound fancy but it is the need of the hour. You need to train your employees on the latest processes and technologies if you wish to be future-ready as an organization.
Once that happens, make sure that their roles are in line with the organizational goals. Post this, select the technical managers and internal champs who are comfortable with technology and understand the business requirements. These internal champions will ensure that most of your employees are in line with the latest organizational trends and processes.
Technology managers have many names in different organizations. In some, they are recognized as innovators and in others, they are identified as trendsetters. In either case, their job is to enable the capabilities within the organization where all the employees adjust to the new way of doing things by leveraging the latest technology.
Identifying the digital managers is not enough. It is also important for a company to foster digital talent by investing in resources that enhance their employees’ capabilities. Hiring an employee is an expensive affair. Your enterprise can end up saving a substantial amount of money if you invest in training your workforce.
Don’t take our word for it. Here are the numbers that will justify this statement: The company that spends on employee training makes 24% more profit than companies that do not.
Onboarding new hires [1] and enabling them to match the expectations of the company takes time. On the other hand, training the existing employees on the latest technology is a better way as it makes them future-ready. It also encourages employee loyalty.
Creating a proper training program can be more difficult than hiring, however, in long run, it pays off.
4. Investing In Modern Tools
In today’s business scenario, companies must embrace the latest tech with open arms to create maximum impact in minimum time. It is impossible for any isolated technology to change the face of your business all by itself. Irrespective of how big or small your organization, you need a combination of technologies and an idea to leverage them properly to get better results.
The latest technology like blockchain, 5G, AI, automation, rapid application development platforms, and digital adoption platforms help you fuel your transformation initiatives. The main aim of using this technology is to get insightful data, create a better user experience, enable efficient training, automate mundane tasks, and make processes faster. For example, more than 58% of B2B organizations [2] leverage automated chatbots that are powered by AI to handle generic requests. Here you can see the intersection of technologies to create a better user experience which eventually helps an organization to reduce internal support tickets. It helps you engage your workforce in more productive tasks and optimizes the existing processes which eventually fuels the transformation efforts.
Platforms like RADs empower developers to accelerate the deployment of any web application, allow seamless integration and scalability across any platform, and enable them to reach out to new markets. While RADs simplify development-related processes, digital adoption platforms help improve existing business processes and also expedite the adoption of applications. They help ensure that your employees or customers easily adopt any newly developed application without any prior training.
The bottom line is that businesses must know how to use technology and make the most of their transformation endeavors. Successful implementation of these technologies will help you make better business decisions and optimize processes across all departments.
5. Integrating Tools And Strategy For Better Outcomes
The coming together of a digital-savvy leader, modern technology, and a prepared workforce lays the foundations for your transformation initiatives, but what ensures success is knowing how best to make them work in unison.
Unfortunately, many companies fail midway, as they miss out on one of these: the workforce, the technology, or the digi-first mindset.
Ensuring an integrated strategy that can stitch back the digital initiatives with the overall business outcomes is a must. To achieve it, companies need to have a strong vision that can be turned into actionable steps which eventually will help achieve organizational goals.
The major questions that you to ask while developing a strategy are:
- What kind of value will be generated once the project is accomplished?
- Will it help you to solve the existing and potential business problems?
- Is the current technology sufficient to get the desired results and if yes, then do they align with the strategy?
6. Monitor, Improve, And Repeat
Often companies collect data without any defined end goal. The business must have a purpose while collecting data to draw meaningful insights to take desired actions. The biggest challenge is that each department has different KPIs and these KPIs are interpreted differently across the organization.
It is a must to know how these KPIs will be analyzed and what they will mean to your business. Once that part is set, you have to understand the different ways in which you can monitor those KPIs and what type of analytics platform can help you achieve it.
Monitoring the deployment, adoption, and training phase can help to ensure success. Don’t be surprised if the objectives are not being accomplished in the initial phase. All you need to do is analyze the gaps and take steps to fill them with each iteration. With time, you will see improvement and your initiatives will start moving in the right direction. Ultimately, you will be in a position where you will start meeting your objectives across all fronts.
Monitoring will be a regular activity, as it will help you make the most out of your transformation initiatives in the long run.
Digital Transformation Is Not Complex
By now you might be thinking that digital transformation is a complex process but it is not. In reality, it is a long process that needs patience and perseverance. Initiating digital transformation is one thing and sustaining it is another. You need a variety of things going in your favor to taste success. To make that a possibility, you need to strategize by considering the employee's role, the technology, and the talent required.
Once you have all these things working in your favor, you can use a training platform, like a digital adoption platform, to ensure success post the roll-out phase.
References:
[1] How Rose Serafini Reinvented the Zendesk Onboarding Experience with Clipchamp Videos
