Almost everyone is talking about digital transformation (DX) but in reality, not everyone acts digital transformation. The level of sophistication and fluidity that a company can attain in today’s digital transformation enabling environment is only limited by the creativity of key players in an organization.
Digital transformation is all about leveraging on the power of business technology management to take your business to heights that it would otherwise only dream of achieving. Have you as a manager taken time to reflect on what digitalization would offer to your business?
Global business pandemic in the form of COVID 19 fast tracked institutions journey to the land where the only way forward is though embracing technology for majority of operations.
What is digital transformation?
Digital transformation simply means the totality of fruitful efforts that organizations put into activities that are designed to help reposition the entity for success.
The journey starts with conversion of existing analogue information resources into digital information resources usually through scanning and manual data entry.
Simply digitizing existing processes or converting your documents to soft copies is not all that there is to digital transformation. It has a beginning but does not have an ending as the changing business environment continues to push businesses to the limit.
Benefits of digital transformation
Digital transformation benefits organizations in two major ways as discussed in the next two paragraphs.
Scalability and flexibility: when properly done, DX gives entities of all kind the ability to economically scale their operations when the need arises. This is by far the best benefit of implementing a well-articulated DX. Unlike physical structure that in most cases requires you to tear down the existing one before building another for any meaningful expansion, technology implementation that truly adopt digital transformation in its true sense do not need to tear down their existing infrastructures when the need to upgrade arises.
Wider reach: the exponential capability of DX means that grounds that organization would have moved mountains to cover are now easily done. How cool is that! Through DX for example, team members can now work remotely from different continents and achieve better results that teams that are physically located in a single location.
How to position your organization reap the benefits of digital transformation
A lot of organizations have been wasting their time and money thinking that they are digitally transforming their business while in the true sense, what they are doing is digitally deforming their entity.
In this section of this article on digital transformation, I will be describing simple steps that needs to be taken if you really want to maximize the return on your digital transformation investments.
Ten (10) steps to implementing digital transformation
- Set up a project team or committee for this task: the first task in the journey of implementing a successful digital transformation is accept the idea and then set up a team with a mandate to ensure that identified deliverables are met. Business case and business requirement documents will provide useful guide at this early stage of implementing DX.
- Formulate a digital transformation strategy: once the project committee finalizes with all the required leg work, the next logical thing to do is to formulate actionable strategies that will help ensure that the project sees the light at the end of the tunnel. You have to bear in mind that strategy is nothing without result when formulating this digital transformation strategy. The strategy must mirror the mission statement of the business through the lenses of available resources.
- Review your business model: it will only take time before everything else crumbles if the business model that the transformation effort is intended to support is not sustainable. An unprofitable business model for example will continue to gulp scarce resources from the business owners until the business model dislocation is fixed. So, make sure that you review your existing business model in the light of your business objectives and prevailing competition.
- Evaluate your digital architectural landscape: the architectural design of your technology infrastructure must be fluid and robust enough to carry all other building blocks of this endeavor.
- Tweak some processes to match the architecture: some of your existing business processes may require some form of business process re-engineering to fit into the new technology overhaul that you are executing. For the full potential of digital transformation to be realized, bottlenecks in your processes must be removed.
- Build human capacity: at the end of the day, it all boils down to human capacity. I little investment in relevant training on a regular basis for your staff is in order and amounts to money well spent.
- Synchronize your organogram with objectives: your organogram must be leaned and synchronized if you really want all the efforts put into shaking up the IT ecosystem of your company to be impactful. Operations that require too many approvals for example may slow things down. Part of the leaning and synchronizing your organogram is deployment and utilization of document handling technologies – this on its own merit is a component of DX when suitable executed.
- Incrementally build on success: DX is more of a gradual process that kind of stack up. Every successful project act as a foundation to the next enhancement. You must have plan for this to work.
- Take responsibility when need be: it is not always rosy on this path to successfully implementing a functional digital transformation.
- Monitor, review, feedback and take corrective action(s): no one sets a system in place and leaves it unattended. This also applies to this quest of digitizing with intent.
I strongly believe that you found answer to your question in this post on digital transformation. If however you still have some questions, please kindly contact us through this email address (accountant@accountantnextdoor.com) for further assistance.
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