Digital Transformation (DX) is the reworking on the products/services, processes, and strategies within an organization by leveraging the current technologies. It covers a re-examination and reinvention from the organization’s supply chain to the workforce skill sets, to management level discussions, to its customer interactions.
The Digital Transformation will assist an organization to keep up with emerging customer demands now as well as in the future in case it sustained. Further, it enables an organization to compete better in an economic landscape along with constantly changing technology progress since transformation is most essential for any kind of business to survive in the future.
Is Digital Transformation just about technology?
Nowadays, as stated by the Information Age, the digital transformation is influencing most of the business strategies. Today, the customers are gradually adopting digital platforms such as mobile apps as well as social media sites to interact with the businesses. Further, they certainly prefer to opt for those companies that are digitally friendly, i.e, have responsive designs on the websites, user-friendly mobile apps, and highly active on the social channels. So, the success of a business predominantly depends on the way in which it responds to customer preferences.
In such a customer-oriented era, implementing the technology that can pursue, evaluate, and respond to the pivotal shifts in customer behaviour plays a crucial role as it could make or break a business. To sustain in the long run, digital leaders must focus on optimizing their customers’ experience and improving the outcomes across multiple channels from the workforce to information to systems. The modern-day technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are supporting the workforce to a great extent by providing significant levels of efficiency to understand customer preferences.
The road-map for Digital Transformation
For an organization, the main objective of digital transformation is to improve its products and services to meet the continuously changing needs of its customers.
To achieve this, the organization needs to rethink over its performance and attempt to improve the margins and decrease costs through a business transformation framework (roadmap) which focuses on defining the roles of individuals/departments, addressing the shortages of the digital skills, and preparing for big challenges.
Defining the roles of individuals/departments
To ensure the maximum effect of the strategy, the organization must clearly define the role of each department and the individuals within each department. For example, both, the CDM and the CMO should work together with the CIO to escalate the transformation process with the help of the collective data analytics, technological insights, and innovative marketing techniques to strengthen the business. As long as everybody is clear on their respective objectives and responsibilities, the business will be able to digitally transform.
Addressing the shortages of digital skills
Nowadays, around 40% of the digital transformation initiatives and 100% of IoT efforts – are supported by cognitive or AI services. However, the crucial problem lies in acquiring the talent to use this cognitive technology to its fullest. As stated by a recent study, most of the CIOs think that the skill shortage is holding them back from getting into the new technology and they need to focus on creating new abilities by acquiring new workforce.
Instead of this, they must encourage the current workforce to enhance their skills by creating open forums where the staff can openly discuss the new technologies, their importance, and implementation. Also, by upskilling the staff with relevant digital courses and providing the appropriate resources/tools, the organization certainly ensures that the digital transformation is the most important aspect of the entire business strategy.
Preparing for big challenges
The swift evolution of digitalization and artificial intelligence in recent time forced the organizations to opt for new operating models. The organizations need to adopt modern-age business platforms to boost direct engagement with customers that might revolve around platform based models, new collaborations ecosystems, and advanced ways for organizing the operations. By being prepared for these challenges, the organizations will probably remain one step ahead of the consumer, retaining the capabilities to form long-lasting associations.
By 2020, it is predicted that most of the business’s existence will depend on their ability to create products/services and experiences that are digitally-enhanced. So, acquire the essential knowledge on emerging digital technologies, leverage the data into as an advantage, and strengthen the business.
Sandeep Dharak works as Marketing Executive for NSS. A Leading Amazon Cloud Services and Application Development Services Provider Company from India.