Digital transformation is a process in which organizations implement digital technologies to reshape business operations. Companies engage in digital transformation to make fundamental operational, strategic, and cultural changes affecting how they serve customers and remain competitive. Businesses reluctant to embrace modern solutions risk losing customers to more forward-looking organizations.
This article presents a roadmap and best practices to transform and modernize your business digitally.
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation involves more than simply adopting new tools and technologies. Let’s look at digital transformation’s key aspects, goals, and challenges.
Key aspects of digital transformation include:
- Technology – Implement solutions leveraging new technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and automation;
- Processes – Redesign and optimize workflows for greater efficiency, speed, and accuracy;
- Corporate culture – Encourage a company mindset focused on innovation, agility, and flexibility;
- Customer experience – Personalize and streamline customer interaction for an enhanced experience.
Companies committing to digital transformation typically want to support and grow their businesses by improving operational efficiency and providing better customer experiences. Business leaders can leverage new technology to make data-driven decisions and provide the flexibility to address trends and opportunities in rapidly evolving markets.
Organizations can face several challenges in digital transformation, including:
- Excessive upfront costs to implement new technology;
- Dependence on legacy technology for business-critical systems;
- Lack of in-house digital skills;
- Meeting regulatory compliance for sensitive data.
Steps to Modernize Your Business
The following steps provide a digital transformation roadmap to help modernize your business.
Develop a vision and strategy
Your company must understand why digital transformation is essential to maintain and grow the business. It is crucial to obtain executive buy-in and support for the initiative. Decision-makers should identify key drivers and objectives for the transformation, such as enhancing customer satisfaction or outperforming the competition.
Your company should align the transformation goals to address these business objectives. These goals define where you want your business to go. Teams and subject-matter experts should be engaged to identify metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) essential to the company and supporting your objectives. This data is vital to gauging the progress and success of the transformation.
Assess the current state of your business
Once you have developed a vision and strategy for where you want to go, you need to assess your business as it exists today. You must perform a comprehensive evaluation of your current business processes, technology solutions, corporate culture, and data resources. Conduct a SWOT analysis to identify your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Analyze how your company stacks up against peers in your market sector.
Build a digital transformation team
Your digital transformation team’s talent and leadership abilities will be instrumental to your company’s success. The team should be led by your Chief Digital Officer (CDO) or a designated transformation lead. Team leaders should draft other members from IT and business units across the organization. It should include change management specialists and data analysts. Companies may wish to partner with a third party experienced with digital transformation.
Identify and prioritize business areas for transformation
Decision-makers must prioritize specific areas for transformation that offer the most significant impact on the business. Leaders can identify these areas by considering the previously developed vision and strategy and comparing them to the current business assessment. Your company should focus on the transformational activities supporting these business aspects.
Examples of focus areas include creating an enhanced customer experience, streamlining operations, optimizing the supply chain, modernizing the IT infrastructure, or improving data analytics capabilities. Your teams should consider a phased implementation approach to reduce risk and learn from the process. Team leaders should divide projects into manageable components that utilize feedback loops to adapt and improve transformation activities.
Define and adopt a digital technology stack
Your company must identify and adopt technologies and solutions that align with transformation objectives. Some of these solutions may already be incorporated into your technology stack. These tools or applications may be candidates for optimization or upgrade to a new and more efficient platform.
Technologies that support digital transformation include:
- Cloud computing using public cloud resources or a hybrid model utilizing some on-premises systems and applications;
- Big data and advanced analytics solutions;
- AI and machine learning tools for automation and data analytics;
- Internet of Things (IoT) solutions to address operational efficiency and customer satisfaction;
- Cybersecurity tools to protect your valuable and sensitive data resources.
Promote a digital culture and effective change management
A successful digital transformation requires your company to adopt a digital culture that welcomes and supports the changes to the business. Leaders should frequently communicate the vision for the transformation to all affected stakeholders. Your company should provide digital skills training to employees and promote an agile and innovative mindset.
Effective change management ensures that business processes are not broken during the transformation and that employees have the necessary skills to handle new solutions. Analyzing change activities in the early stages can result in greater efficiency as the transformation continues.
Monitor and optimize processes
Teams should track KPIs to evaluate the benefits of the transformation. Analytics can provide insight into performance and user behavior that can be beneficial in optimizing transformation activities and new solutions in the environment. Ideally, your company should strive to optimize its digital landscape continuously.
How VAST Supports Your Company’s Digital Transformation
At VAST, we understand how significant digital transformation is to your company’s ability to compete in today’s crowded market. We offer a portfolio of services to support and manage your transformation and ensure its success.
- Our data center transformation service is designed to map your business vision with the appropriate cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
- Discovery and assessment services help you understand your existing environment and chart a successful cloud migration.
- Digital transformation implies a greater reliance on data and IT solutions to support the business. Our cloud backup-as-a-service (CBaaS) and disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) offerings provide the data and system protection your company needs.
- We can help you implement and manage a cloud access security broker (CASB) solution to keep data secure wherever it resides.
Contact us to learn more about how we can help you modernize your business.
