12 Secrets to Developing A Successful Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation transforms how an enterprise operates. A survey by Everest Group found that 73% of respondents didn’t expect a significant increase in business value from digital transformation. This blog will share 12 secrets to developing a successful digital transformation journey.

1. Define Your Ambition

Your organization must answer the following questions to achieve success: What are the desired outcomes of your transformation? Do you want to increase sales, revenue, or sell to existing customers? What direction is your future transformation?

These questions should be addressed by you:

• By ensuring wide organizational alignment, you can articulate your digital business strategy.
• The digital age requires you to rethink your business.
• For the enterprise to achieve its transformation goals, define governance and prioritization.
• To tell the story of transformation to your organization, create a compelling communication strategy.
• Define clearly the adoption speed and risk levels — financial, regulatory, reputational — you are willing to accept in this journey.

2. Establish a Main Digital and Innovation Office

The Chief Digital and Innovation Officer is the leader and integrator of digital transformation. The CDIO is the key point of decision-making in difficult and complex situations. This includes coordinating cross-department efforts and resolving conflict. They also coordinate the rollout and management of digital capabilities and initiatives. This is why CDIO should be in charge of this project.

• CDIO assists in fully integrating technology into the business and resolving performance gaps between business units.
• They create a common language and a decision-making structure.
• They also help to establish an Innovation Office to identify Pilot and POC. They include innovation at the following scale:
• Intelligent simulations can help you innovate in your business
• Automated routine work can bring about functional innovation
• AI-augmented workflows enable edge innovation

Identify distinct workstreams and leads

• Digitization / Digital Optimization
• Employee Productivity
• Customer Experience
• Operations Excellence

Also read: The Role of Data Analytics in Product Development R&D Process

3. Consider digital strategies an integral part of your business strategies

Digital transformation is more about strategy and mindset than technology. It allows organizations to improve their operations and contributes to the growth of the company. Digital transformation is a lengthy journey. The goals and target metrics for digital transformation will continue to change and move constantly.
To ensure inclusion:

• Establish your baseline for Digital Maturity, and create a strategic roadmap.
• A simple, but comprehensive view of Digital Initiatives.
• You can quantify your digital progress by using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which are metrics. Along with these metrics, It would also be useful to incorporate other performance tools like the balanced scorecard, that allows measuring the company’s health by focusing on big-picture strategic goals.
• Define the structure of your governance to meet your unique needs.

4. Focus on the Customer Journey

In order to create an organization’s vision, it is important to put the customer first and focus on the customer journey. This would allow you to leverage technology to provide more relevant ways for customers to interact with you and provide exceptional customer service at every touchpoint. To build a strong customer relationship

• Your customer will feel a stronger emotional connection.
• Assess the impact of your digital transformation strategy on customers and industry.
• Rethink customer loyalty and engage customers digitally.
• As part of digitally enhanced experiences for customers, create customer engagement hubs.
• You must ensure that your customers’ needs are considered when designing your frameworks.
• You can monitor the environment to see if and when there are changes that could impact your digital ambitions.

5. Change the Product Mindset and Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) model

What is the key to digital transformation? First and foremost, a shift in the mindset would be my first guess. Enterprises need to tap into their futurist side to find effective and manageable entry points to digital transformation. They must also shift to a service-as-a-service (XaaS), mindset. These are some of the ways you can achieve this.

• When planning for the future, business leaders need to consider “dream customer journeys”
• To ensure that your knowledge is up-to-date, you should evaluate disruptive markets and technological innovations in your industry.
• Establish a culture of experimentation with a service as a service (XaaS) model and shift product mindset, product consumption.

6. Use an Appropriate Framework to Help Your Workforce Through Change

Inform your workforce about digital transformation. Resistance to change is common, so it is important that your workforce is comfortable with the benefits of digital transformation.

• You must create a safe and secure environment for your workforce. Be open about any changes. You must ensure that work is coordinated according to the organizational hierarchy. Don’t surprise employees or executive committee members by making unplanned changes.
• Get into a Change Mindset — You can beat homeostasis by preparing your workforce for change. You can do this by properly informing your workforce about the transition and how it will benefit them.
  Find the “champion of change”

Also read: The Low-Code Development: Where are Organizations Low-Code Platforms

7. Be Agile. Fail Fast, Learn Fast, Deliver Fast!

DevOps/DevSecOps is the foundation. Low Code/No Code platforms are an alternative.

Be flexible with the deployment of your small- and medium-term goals. You should be focusing on the pilots and learning from them. Then, make changes as needed. You can learn from your mistakes and see the red flags in the pilot’s cockpit if you are focused on the small details.

Continuous improvements are necessary to keep your processes current. Here are the steps you should take:

• Digital optimization: Lean and agile workflows
• Analytics for the workforce
• Analytics for business processes

To accomplish the following tasks, you can use application leaders who are responsible for creating digital business strategies to complete the following tasks.

• You can hack the culture by taking small, but powerful, steps such as redefining roles and persons, to increase collaboration and innovation.
• Incorporate a product first thought in the development processes to encourage improvement, delivery, and customer value.
• Invest in multi-experience and low code/no-code technologies to maximize Mesh App and Service Architecture.

8. Security as an Enabler For Digital Transformation

Gartner forecasted that 60% of digital businesses will experience major service failures before 2020, due to the inability to manage digital risks. Companies are now faced with regulatory and compliance challenges as the world has become increasingly virtual.

Customers today are more tech-savvy and will prefer to interact with companies that are trustworthy, compliant, and secure. Security must not be an afterthought if enterprises want to succeed in this journey. Security must be an integral part of every design. This will allow you to reduce costs and avoid the need for re-engineering late in the process.

9. Data as an Asset

Data is the new currency for digital businesses.

An organization’s leadership must invest in data generation to ensure that it can be shared between departments and managed to generate value in the digital age. Here are some ways that mining and managing data can help you in your business operations.

• It assists in identifying hidden patterns and creating a framework to capture them into various functions and contexts within the organization.
• Customers-focused functions can make use of the data from data to increase customer lead conversion, acquire new customers and retain clients.
• Companies that are digital-native can use their resources to create data that provides greater insight into product creation and future value creation opportunities.
• To answer the question “What happened?”, you have to have the right mix of Data Analytics Solutions. What’s happening? AI-powered Predictive Analytics (to forecast What will happen) What if? What if?

10. Own Your Digital Transformation

It is tempting to get caught in the vendor trap. This can be tempting especially when you consider all the moving parts, technologies, platforms, and stakeholders that could pull you in many different directions. This is how to control your destiny.

• Manage vendor innovation.
• Co-Innovate and co-invest with System Integration partners or vendors to move beyond traditional outsourcing.
• Your capabilities in CDO, business units, and IT organization will be enhanced.
• All feedback, good and not so good, should be taken into consideration

Also read: What is the 5G Scenarios in Digital Transformation

11. Establishing a Technology Roadmap and Strategic Technology Partnership

• Avoid falling for the trap of enticing technology (even buzzwords!).
• Create a roadmap for digital transformation and identify gaps.
• Innovation in the areas of IT tools, design solution experimentation, and IT tools.
• Technology alignment support for digital business transformation
• Instead of focusing on technology vendors, develop strategic partnerships in Technology.
• Establish a strategic partnership between you and a System Integration partner that has the right delivery model.
• Define your Multi-Cloud/Distributed Cloud strategy.
• Assess the benefits of open platforms.
• Leverage low code/no-code platforms.
• Digital Decoupling and 7R Application Disposition Models can reduce technical debt. This is not only for
• remortgaging using Robotics Process Automation (RPA).
• Adopt Human Centric Design.
• Remember to keep your gun handy and to celebrate every step of the way.

12. Developing a Partnership Ecosystem for Network Impact

Find strategic partners that align with your vision of transformation to increase the quality and speed of your initiatives.

The lines between traditional industries are being blurred by digital disruption. As agile new entrants (e.g. Fintech, Startups, and niche Cloud-based companies are giving customers more control and realizing the advantages of new business models. To harness the power of strategic partnerships to create a strong ecosystem that can advance digital transformation, foster collaboration and deliver meaningful outcomes for customers, leverage the network effect of these partnerships

Summary

Although it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the digital transformation process, failures of pilots can cause significant financial damage to the enterprise. They also waste time, money, and resources. This is where the solution lies: closely examine the results of the digital transformation process and analyze them.