What is Digital Transformation?

Digital Transformation is a process of using digital technologies to transform business processes by digitizing, digitalizing, and adding value to customer interactions. 

Why Digital Transformation?

Digital Transformation is important because it has enabled automation in terms of process workflows, communication, and data analytics. 

From an end user’s perspective, it enhances ease of use, access, and communication.

From an industry perspective, it adds value to customer experience and improves organisational culture.

Digital Transformation of people as Customers and Industries

Organizations have digitized end-to-end operations such as sales, people & culture, customer support, and supply chain management.

A few examples of how industries have digitally transformed are given below:

While digital transformation embraces technology, the key to successful digital transformation lies with how people/organizations transform the digital technologies to improve business processes, models, and organisational culture.  

Leveraging Digital Transformation

Before determining the digital tools for an organization, the leadership needs to have a clear vision and strategy of digital tools that will enable in achieving the strategic objectives. 

Laying the Foundation for Digital Transformation

Enlightening the organisation of the proposed digital changes and their advantages in terms of increased operational efficiency, staff skill upgradation, and new career opportunities. 

Transition to Digital Transformation

The current processes and tools in an organization should be evaluated thoroughly and refined ensuring the optimum balance between the customer’s needs, the process or procedure to fulfil these needs, and the goal or objective of the organization. This leads to the development of a new product, service or process.

This can be done with many process improvement methodologies like DMADV.

DMADV is a Six Sigma framework that focuses on the development of a new product, service, or process. It is an acronym for the five phases of DMADV: define, measure, analyse, design, and verify. 

The Verify step includes a plan to transition the product or service to a routine operation and to ensure that this change is sustainable. It is in this stage we determine what digital tools are required to automate the product or service or process.

Sustaining Digital Transformation

To sustain digital transformation, organizations will need to have the right digital capabilities.

The Mckinsey digital experts have defined six factors that help to sustain change.

1. Diverse tech talent-Organizations need to get the people model right because that’s what enables a culture of iteration and innovation across the organization.
2. Customer-centric design thinking – Customer-centric design thinking presents a chance for the company to better the service to customers.
3. Agile ways of working– An agile approach is a mindset shift for leaders—it’s all about what minimal viable product you can achieve within specific constraints. 
4. Data literacy – Organizations of the future will need to ensure their algorithmic models are fair and validated in production.
5. Next-gen technology –Organizations need to adapt to new technologies based on the new business needs.
6. Analytical reasoning – Continual improvement by breaking down problems, analysing patterns in data, leveraging new kinds of data, and continuously finding different solutions is vital for leaders of an organization.

Conclusion

Digital transformation succeeds when digitalization undertakes a transitional process rather than jumping to its final transformed state.