What is Digital Transformation?

The business landscape is fast-moving and continuously evolving. Innovation happens at a rapid pace. Digital transformation is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot. From small shops to giant corporations, everyone’s doing it.

This guide will be all about digital transformation. We will investigate some of its aspects, what it is, the best practices, and how it can help your company.

But what is it?

Digital transformation is the adoption of technology into all aspects of your business. It expands across operations, marketing, customer service, HR, administration, and more. As a result, it can help you become more efficient and stay ahead of your competitors.

A robust implementation strategy and accurate knowledge of the challenges are required.

So, let’s learn why you should be interested in thriving in today’s fast-paced business world and having a competitive edge.

Digital Transformation: A Necessity in Today’s Technological World

Regardless of your industry, if you are not embracing technology, you are at a disadvantage. Technology moves fast, and consumers are tech-savvy. They have access to a world of knowledge and options in the palm of their hands.

To keep up with this ever evolving and growing landscape, organizations need to embrace change, closely monitor the trends in their industry, and listen to their customers.

Let’s go back in time to see the devastating effects of a well-known company’s decision not to embrace the evolution of technology.

One of the most significant examples of failed adoption of market lead innovations was Kodak’s failure to keep up with the technological evolution of cameras. Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975. Still, Kodak’s management had told its inventor, Steve Sasson, an electrical engineer at Kodak, “That’s cute, but don’t tell anyone about it. That’s how you shoot yourself in the foot!”. Quite a response for one of the first digital cameras ever invented.

As we all know today, Kodak is no longer relevant in the photography industry. But their failure brought to light a crucial lesson. Ignorance of new technologies and failure to adapt to changing marketing dynamics will have drastic repercussions and sometimes fatal ones as Kodak’s case.

Digital transformation is implemented differently depending on the company’s business model. It can be defined broadly as adopting and integrating technology into all business areas such as operations, HR, product development, marketing, and more. You can use technology to modify and improve your business processes to make operations more effective and efficient.

What It Means to Implement

It will help you gain efficiency and agility as a business. But what does it mean to implement it?

This kind of change doesn’t only have to do with science or technology. It is also a matter of challenging traditions and cultures in the corporate world. Often it will mean letting go of the old habits and methods of doing business.

If you are working in marketing, it can come in the form of marketing automation.

For example, setting up workflows that automatically process lead data from your website’s contacts or request a quote form and generate a specific action such as an email to a sales team with the lead data.

If you are working in Sales, it could come in the form of adopting a CRM linked to the other departments such as finance, marketing, or customer service.

A customer relationship manager is a digital tool, usually web-based, that allows users to have quick access to their customer data such as order history, claims, communications and provides an intuitive platform to interact with prospects and customers.

This provides a real advantage for the company, as the data is retained in a central location, shared across departments, and archived for future needs.

Best Practices

There are some core digital transformation best practices that every organization should follow, no matter its size. A clear understanding of the challenges your customers face, the company’s willingness to embrace and implement change, and of course, a well-planned strategy.

The goal is to identify the organization’s scope and problems in day-to-day processes to improve them.

1. Identify The Problem

Identifying the challenges remains one of the essential steps in the digital transformation journey.

To solve a problem, you must be aware of it.

Focus on identifying the challenge and determine what tools would best help you and your company resolve it. Keeping in mind that the goal is to create a more efficient process, you must have resources available such as champions to drive the project, a realistic budget to support the project, and a culture of change to implement the project.

Companies cannot just expect to adopt technologies, digitize their business processes, and forget about it, going back to business as usual. It needs to be benchmarked, monitored, and optimized. It is an ongoing project.

2. Collaboration

Teamwork and collaboration are crucial to an organization’s success. As the saying goes, teamwork makes the dream work. When you encourage teamwork and collaboration from a top-down approach, you effectively set the right tone. According to a study by BCG of 40 digital transformations, companies that focus on culture are 5x more likely to achieve breakthrough performance than companies that don’t focus on culture.

Solving challenges in a company requires cross-functional teams that can provide the right expertise and knowledge from within the company. The teams can leverage this expertise and knowledge to make impactful decisions.

To be implemented successfully, silos need to be broken down. A business silo is a division of workers based on their department or function. Breaking down those silos would entail the involvement of many different teams, from finance to customer service, through sales and marketing.

Collaboration quality and effectiveness directly depend on the preliminary requirements identified at the start of the journey. Having a precise understanding of the challenge provides the teams with the vision and end goal that everyone aims to achieve.

3. The Right Culture

Company culture plays a significant role in digital transformation.

According to Deloitte, “Failure to align the effort with employee values and behaviors can create additional risks to an organization’s culture if not managed properly, whereas a comprehensive and collaborative effort can help shift the culture to understand, embrace, and advance digital transformation.”

Achieving employee buy-in is not an easy task; it takes strong leadership to create a sense of ownership and is crucial to maintain momentum in your company’s journey successfully. But, more importantly, when you have secured your employee’s buy-in, they will feel a sense of belonging and drive the transformation alongside technology.

4. Put Yourself in The Customer’s Place But Do Not Forget Business Needs

As we already mentioned, it should put the customer front and center. So ask yourself, how can you improve your processes and adopt technology to improve your customers’ experience.

Customer satisfaction should be the first goal.

You can talk to your customers using surveys, direct feedback, and analytical tools to determine specific pain points. This allows you to create a holistic and integrated implementation strategy based on these critical insights. There should be an alignment between your goals. The idea is to improve processes to help your customers while allowing your business to be more efficient, compete better in the market, and generate more revenue.

Challenges

Every new change will come with its fair share of challenges and opportunities.

There are three main challenges you need to be aware of:

1. Change Management Strategy

Digital transformation can alter how business processes look for your business. Depending on your current state, it will require a robust change management strategy.

Organizations need to understand what processes need to be improved.

For example, if your business suffers from not meeting deadlines, the pain point would be “our business is not meeting deadlines”.

As a business, you should ask yourself:

Why are we not meeting our deadlines?
Who is responsible for meeting our deadlines?
How do we meet our deadlines?
What technology can we use?
Who will drive the use of this technology?
How does it support the goal to “Meet deadlines”?

Once you completely understand the problem, you can set the right tone for your stakeholders and teams who will be driving this change. Without it, you would venture into uncertainty, and efforts would lose momentum while your spending increases way beyond budget.

2. Cyberattacks and Security

Significant organizational changes come with inherent security concerns. You will be handling a lot of sensitive and confidential data. As your organization adopts technology, the risk of cyberattacks and security breaches can become a significant concern. You can’t underestimate the role a security culture plays. Cyber attackers benefit from a lack of security awareness and untrained employees in the organizations they attack. Employees should be trained and re-trained on cyber security, and a sense of responsibility should be embedded in every member of your team.

3. The Budget

Then there is the age-old discussion of budget. It is not cheap and should not be regarded as an expense but rather an investment. This investment for the future will help you grow. You need to understand long-term goals and the ROI to prepare an adequate budget for your project.

A lack of proper strategy will cause more constraints and increase costs above your budget as you push projects and specific tasks beyond the deadline. You need to understand how a specific technology will impact your end goal and the market dynamics. In this case, considering ROI is critical.

Opportunities

Do not shy away from it just because there are some challenges; opportunities are plentiful. Start with low-hanging fruits (easy to implement) and progress towards more complex challenges once you have established a process and have gained experience. This provides your organization with substantial learning experiences and prepares you for those more complex challenges.

CARTLY is built with ease of use in mind. Its multi-device compatibility, high usage flexibility, and features provide an easy way to start your journey.

If you wonder what a digital business card is, check out our article on the subject.

But why does your organization need digital business cards? Here are some insights on why your company needs digital business cards.

The many advantages, such as simplified on boarding and fast deployment time, will significantly ease the implementation process. Delegate individual access to your employees from the customer portal for a smooth on boarding experience. But wait, that’s not all!

There is no app to download.

Centralize your management with an intuitive dashboard to manage your fleet, create additional business cards, update or delete outdated information. View collected contact data received through your digital business card and export it to your company’s CRM.

Cost reduction also plays an essential role in digital transformation. . By going digital, you simplify and streamline the creation process; no more designers or printers are needed.

Create a business card in less than one minute.

Eliminate the printing costs of traditional paper business cards and instantly deploy your company’s digital business cards.

Digital business card implementation is a low-hanging fruit in your digital journey.

Whether for 10 or 1000 employees, we provide our clients with rapid deployment times, an intuitive user dashboard, added-value features, and automation for your digital business card fleet.

Business cards are one of the last few remaining processes that have gone unchanged for almost five centuries.

So, let’s start getting your company a real return on investment with CARTLY digital business cards.

The Ultimate Winners

Companies that embrace change, stay on the cutting edge of innovation and will be the ultimate winners and will leverage all the benefits digital transformation offers.

It is a necessary disruption for today’s modern and fast-paced world.

Sources

BCG Global. (2022, February 25). How to drive a digital transformation: Culture is key. BCG Global. Retrieved March 13, 2022, from https://www.bcg.com/capabilities/digital-technology-data/digital-transformation/how-to-drive-digital-culture

Boulton, C., &amp; Writer, S. (2021, June 24). What is Digital Transformation? A necessary disruption. CIO. Retrieved March 13, 2022, from https://www.cio.com/article/230425/what-is-digital-transformation-a-necessary-disruption.html

Cook, C. (2021, December 22). Why a successful digital transformation is more about people than Tech. Work Life by Atlassian. Retrieved March 13, 2022, from https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/successful-digital-transformation-people

Dow Jones &amp; Company. (2019, July 19). The role of culture in digital transformation. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved March 13, 2022, from https://deloitte.wsj.com/articles/the-role-of-culture-in-digital-transformation-01563498125

Görkem GençerGörkem is an industry analyst at AIMultiple. His interest in economic history awakened during his master's studies at the Stockholm School of Economics in Applied Economics. Since then, &amp; *, N. (2022, March 8). Top 7 digital transformation best practices for the organizations. AIMultiple. Retrieved March 13, 2022, from https://research.aimultiple.com/digital-transformation-best-practices/

Liolis, S. (2021, June 21). You shall not pass: Silos must be broken down for successful digital transformation. NewsBreak. Retrieved March 13, 2022, from https://www.newsbreak.com/news/2287924564866/you-shall-not-pass-silos-must-be-broken-down-for-successful-digital-transformation

McLaughlin, S. (2021, October 15). The Business Opportunities of Digitalisation and digital transformation in manufacturing. SL Controls. Retrieved March 13, 2022, from https://slcontrols.com/en/the-business-opportunities-of-digitalisation-and-digital-transformation-in-manufacturing/#:~:text=Opportunities%20like%20product%20customisation%20enhance,closer%20to%20the%20business%20overall.

What is Digital Transformation? why is it important. Salesforce.com. (n.d.). Retrieved March 13, 2022, from https://www.salesforce.com/products/platform/what-is-digital-transformation/