Digital transformation is the latest buzzword in the latest long line of technology focused on business. Digital transformation involves integrating digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how businesses operate and deliver value to customers. It also involves cultural changes where organizations continually experiment and get comfortable with failure.
Digital transformation is essential for any business, regardless of the size. It is through the digital transformation that a business remains competitive and relevant in the rapidly changing business world. This article examines digital transformation looking at how it works and providing clarity on several emerging issues surrounding digital transformation.
What Is Digital Transformation?
The basic definition of digital transformation is integrating digital technology into different areas of a business resulting in fundamental changes in how businesses operate plus how they deliver value to customers. Beyond integrating digital technology, digital transformation also involves cultural changes where organizations walk away from their long-standing business traditions and implement new practices.
The main idea behind digital transformation is to leverage technology to transform a process to become more effective and efficient. Digital transformation involves different technologies, notably artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, and the Internet of things. The use of these technologies is to convert an existing service into a digital form as well as use technology to make service delivery much better.
The first step in digital transformation involves making a problem statement. For instance, “why” should an organization implement digital transformation? Is it to enhance the customer experience? Reduce friction? Increase productivity or elevate profitability? By establishing the real reason why digital transformation is needed, an organization will be better placed to implement the transformation.
Types Of Digital Transformation
Customer Experience
Digital transformation involving customer experience seeks to understand in more detail, use technology to propel customer growth, and create more customer touchpoints.
Business Models
Digital transformation in business models involves transforming an organization’s business model by augmenting physical offerings with digital tools and services, introducing digital products, and leveraging technology to offer global shared services.
Operational Processes
This seeks to streamline the internal processes of an organization by employing digitization and automation, enabling employees with digital tools as well as collecting data to monitor performance, plus enable an organization to make more strategic business decisions.
Why Is Digital Transformation Important?
While organizations may have different goals for implementing digital transformation, digital transformation’s primary function is to enhance your current processes. Digital transformation is essential to enable an organization to achieve its set goals by remaining competitive in the sector. Through digital transformation, organizations can seamlessly adapt to the dynamic industry standards and continually improve on their operation.
Some Of The Benefits Of Digital Transformation In An Organization Include:
- Enhanced customer experience.
- Improved efficiency, speed, and agility.
- Enhanced data processing, reporting, and analytics.
- Improved communication, productivity, and team communication.
- Allows a business to adapt faster to changes in customer needs as well as the hugely competitive landscape.
- Enables organizations to cut costs by optimizing business processes and automatic recurring tasks.
- Through digital transformation, a business can continuously analyze and optimize business processes and activities.
How Can An Organization Drive Digital Transformation?
There are several steps an organization has to take to begin reimagining and rethinking a business through digital transformation. For a business to successfully realize digital transformation, it needs to implement and continually address the five key drivers of digital transformation: privacy, culture, augmented intelligence, digital twin, and digital product management.
Digital Twin
Digital twin is defined as the digital representation of a real-world entity or system. Digital twins allow for seamless digital transformation as they facilitate the collection and experimentation of data to support more informed business decisions.
Culture
Culture is a crucial driver of digital transformation. Research has shown that culture is the biggest barrier to digital transformation. Addressing cultural issues ensures that an organization can realize digital transformation.
Privacy
Organizations must be concerned with the privacy of every player to be successful in digital transformation. Consumers and employees won’t support digital transformation if they feel their privacy or personal data security is violated.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence supports intelligent transformation in commerce by enabling data collection and analysis capabilities. Using AI, organizations can combine technology, data, and humans to drive positive business outcomes and become leaders in their respective sectors.
Digital Product Management
Digital product management involves designing products with a view of enhancing customer experience. Digital product management is all about designing and creating products to serve a particular purpose. For instance, Apple developed a watch that monitors the wearer’s health and gives insight, despite not being in the healthcare industry.
Conclusion
Digital transformation has become imperative for all businesses, regardless of size. Today’s technological landscape has made businesses more competitive than ever before. Organizations, therefore, have to embrace digital transformation to compete in the current dynamic technology and customer-driven landscape. To realize a successful transformation, organizations have to implement best practices, know their employees and understand the digital landscape in their specific niche. Digital transformation has immense benefits and cannot be ignored regardless of how small or big an enterprise is.
