Digital Transformation Archives - W2S Solutions Blog

Digital transformation stats in 2019

Approximately 85% of business leaders think that they have a timeframe of fewer than two years to make giant strides into digital transformation initiatives. Moreover, about 34% of enterprises already undergone digital transformation in the past three years.

These figures are gaining a fair share of attention as people are starting to believe in digital transformation, and the practice is related to it. While these figures paint one side of the story, do note that digital transformation is one of the most preached but equally confusing topics in the business world. There have been instances when even the senior-most leaders have put their wrong foot ahead. While numerous businesses are merely developing and flourishing based on how effectively they are transforming in the digital age.

How to define digital transformation?

Digital transformation is the process of making logically connected cognitive changes in your business process (on the business as well as customer side) for improved customer experience, better productivity, data-driven approach, relevant goal setting, and the overall business approach.

Overlooking customer mind mapping

The just established upfront and digital transformation are baseless without setting customer-oriented goals. It requires through mind mapping of the customers. The essential exercise will lead you to use professional research tools like fishbone diagrams, tables, charts, and analysis. It, in turn, allows you to have an insight into the mind of your most probable customer.

After in-depth mind mapping of your customers, you should be having complete clarity on matters like customer expectations, the bridge between your business goals and customer expectation. The process should also successfully empower you to predict the next best customer-oriented business strategy precisely. It should also outline the dimension of competition which your company may need to recalibrate.

Disruptive digital transformation leaders are working hand-in-hand with new-age founders and entrepreneurs to kick start the digital transformation process. It should completely coincide with business incubation and establishment. You can find the most innovative company that can help you with technology consulting and an all-round versatile marketing approach. It is bound to lead you to ultimate business success within the best possible time.

Related Article – A Guide to Digital Transformation and Cloud Migration

Blindness at business priorities & goals

Digital transformation can never mean a blind idea of using technologies. Neither is about simply adopting but not adapting to applications, tools, and digital resources for the millennial generation. Digital transformation is an absolutely logical and very reasonably conceived project in any business of the 21st century. The focus should always remain on de-cluttering your digital transformation journey. It can be done with steps and tasks that can be scaled in the long run. Company vision and decently farfetched goals purely lead them.

Every digital transformation practice (whether on client site for the backend business process) should be logically connected to one or more business use cases with clear priorities. It should be a graph building activity that can model your digital transformation with utmost clarity. It should not confine your focus on localized digital transformation. It will be piloted around your highest USP area. It is generally either the customer engagement side of marketing or maybe business intelligence in your core business process. All things and ideas should bring about a disruptive digital transformation has to be deep-rooted around your properties, and the platform should thoroughly verify them.

Not keeping CX at no. 1 on outcome list

It is not a fool’s play that technology thought leaders keep ranting about the importance of a customer-centric business. Any business which is not able to thoroughly understand the mind of the customers, their needs and expectations, is undoubtedly going to fail in the long run. As we try to bridge customer expectations and requirements for the digital business landscape, this is precisely where customer experience or CX comes into the picture. For a layman, customer experience imparted by a digital business is a collective canvas painted by the capabilities and level of satisfaction reached.Leading web and mobile app development companies build core differentiators pivoted around CX imparted by the client. The power and genuineness of the concept are pretty evident. Businesses are hell-bent on taking the pole position around overall outstanding customer experience. For a more viable approach, the ultimate goal of every task, digital transformation pursuit should lead you to a massive contribution to customer experience. The margin of customer experience enhancement is a viable metric for the success of your digital transformation efforts.

Finding siloed transformation effects

Transformation is well connected and supremely embedded project that runs through each process and task of business. Many businesses generally try to find the progress of path-breaking results of a particular transformation effort. Then they look for results in a specific department of their business. It is an immature approach to deal with it. It is all about the collective impact that elevates your business under the light of transformation and not just a particular task.For instance, business accounting earlier operated through paperwork files and folders. Now you have started using niche accounting and invoicing software. It will depend a lot on factors that lead you to an increase in the magnitude of customer experience. It will also include customer engagement, onboarding process, and service rendered. It is wise to restrain from finding isolated results in business with superficial efforts.

Not connecting the dots

Digital transformation should be conceived with a bottom-up augmenting approach. It should not be driven or affected by any preconceived notion. Nor they should provide an intuitive insight that leads you to the wrong path. A proper system of logically connected digital transformation efforts should become a self-sustainable and self complimenting system. One task is always benefiting the other with its results and achieves goals.

For instance, if your company is practicing data analytics for BI, it should become the foundation of your content marketing strategies. It should consequently derive mobile app marketing and engagement analytics. The collective efforts and results from these projects should lead you to super bright insights for the primary requirement and a disguised marketing plan. Once you have a clear-cut marketing plan, you can use the impact of the marketing plan to confidently allocate a more significant portion of the budget into it. That should be easily verified by data analytics practices where it all started. It should connect all the dots and ultimately come out like a ring that sustains on itself and helps your business automate digitally.

Mixing business-side with customer-side

Various digital transformations have died a cruel death due to the intermixing of the business and customer side goals, tasks, and priorities. It is essential to see the effects of transformation on the whole and focus on the bigger picture reflecting the imprints of your digital business footprints. But, your efforts and planning should never be affected or confused based on fine-line differences and matter of your business idea.

Best performing technologies for digital transformation

Cloud computingDigital transformation is being catalyzed by various such products that are serving niche purpose and ultimately decreasing the survival cost of businesses within all classes. IaaS-based products like AWS are promoting the core digitization. On the contrary, various SaaS-products are helping companies maximize their productivity, effectiveness, and overall profitability with the business.Cloud is also making it possible for niche services like real-time location data services and delivery management systems. These are now becoming micro-retail business products that can be put into widespread use for a scaled customer base among new start-ups in the Indian ecosystem.

Data analytics, BISaaS-based products and highly specialized approaches for adopting data-driven business mechanisms have led to the onset of data analytics fame. Data analytics is now strategically targeted to fuel business goals and make predictions and forecasting models for sales and customer engagement.

There are various digital marketing tools, mobile app analytics tools, and strategies that are put to use under the label of data analytics. It can be backed by warehousing that ultimately achieves the goal with business intelligence.

ML and Artificial Intelligence (AI)Machine learning practiced for achieving high-level artificial intelligence is fuelling the trends. Better customer engagement and intelligence-driven customer experience are making way through chatbots artificially intelligent agents and voice-based assistants. The likes of Google Assistant, Siri, and Bixby have driven voice-based AI to widespread use. Approximately 72% of users with voice-activated speakers use it for daily routine.

AR VRAugmented reality is massively contributing to the e-commerce customer experience by letting people try the products or even making them fit in case needed. Various e-commerce sites like Lenskart for spectacles are allowing people to use augmented reality kits. These kits are enabling people to try the frames and spectacles which they want to buy. It is creating a magnetizing effect and having a gradually sustained impact on sales patterns. On the other hand, virtual reality is another multimedia technology that is building an immense impact on creating virtual e-commerce stores giving rise to V-commerce.

Bottom line

It is essential to understand that your digital transformation project and enthusiasm for the same should not die out under the burden of confusion. A clear vision is required behind using the right products and technologies, including the tools. It should be an extremely sophisticated, well-planned effort to use the techniques which you may need. There should be no fear of missing out on technologies or FOMO as per the millennial slang.

You should first analyze a reasonable need for a particular technology in your business. Further, understand its direct impact both in the short and long term. Once you are clear on the prospects and have a refined perspective, you will be in a better position to drive your digital transformation journey. It is more effective and cost-effective and highly productive lines of business and commerce.

As long as businesses exist, the question of how they can be more productive will exist as well. In fact, if you aren’t already considering how you can optimize your workforce for greater productivity today, then you may find your organization lagging behind the competition.

This is particularly of concern in an era of business where technology develops at such a rapid pace. Developments are flipping entire industries on their heads and causing companies to grapple to find the best ways to invest, implement and adjust to these new innovations. But how should you get your organization started down the road to greater digital compliance? Between juggling your daily operations and researching these new solutions, it’s no surprise that businesses often have no other choice than to stick with their outdated tech (which can contribute to a number of missed opportunities).

The solution for many is to comply with Digital Transformation and Cloud Migration best practices to ensure that the tools you decide to use are properly integrated into your company workflows, culture and communication methods.

But First: What Are Digital Transformation and Cloud Migration?

Unlike an actual piece of technology you can purchase—such as a new Live Tracking System or mobile application— Digital Transformation and Cloud Migration are both better defined as an ideology or service that you can introduce to your current tech strategy.

Let’s start with Digital Transformation, or DX. This business process can be simply defined as the use of technology to not only replicate an existing service or workflow, but to replace it with a more time- and energy- efficient system. It’s important to note that successful DX is more than deploying new technology into your business and considers the following as well:

How clearly and preemptively leadership communicated the change
The level at which daily workflows and procedures were modified to include new technologies
How widespread new tools are implemented across the company
The amount in which people directly affected by this change were involved in the transformation

As a single facet of a larger Digital Transformation initiative, Cloud Migration adopts new, internet-powered solutions to the ways that businesses store their information, access tools and communicate with internal and external personnel. Cloud Migration is defined as “moving data, applications or other business elements to a cloud computing environment.” While there are many different methods to perform cloud migration, all of them include moving information and services on localized—often on-site—centers to public cloud infrastructures, allowing simpler accessibility, security and IT management.

So where, exactly, is the intersection between Digital Transformation and Cloud Migration? Since many, if not all, modern digital tools offer cloud components, businesses can execute their DX plan by focusing on migrating current practices to the cloud or by ensuring that tools found to replace them are powered by the cloud.

Perform a Manual Workflow Audit

The first step to enacting Digital Transformation and Cloud Migration in your business is to audit your existing, most outdated work processes. After all, how can you hope to build upon your current digital situation without a comprehensive understanding of where you stand?

Audits are an effective method to glean insights on your manual workflows—be it data entry, customer emailing or inventory management—to pinpoint the specific aspects of the workflow that can best be improved through digitization. Workflow audits can also help you find any areas within your business that rely on faulty information, and with 60% of B2B professionals evaluating the health of their data as unreliable, this is an essential aspect of the audit for every business to consider.

The correct frame of mind when auditing is to find the single workflow that has the greatest opportunity for improvement. Starting your Digital Transformation with just a single workflow helps you understand the process before rolling it out across the entire company.

Here are a few key aspects of your audit to consider when finding the right workflow to digitally optimize:

Does this workflow use multiple tools with overlapping functionalities?
Does this workflow result in multiple human errors or mistakes?
Does this workflow require menial, repetitive tasks to be completed?
Does this workflow rely on physical documentation or data that could otherwise be included in a digitized storage system?

Research New Tools

Once you’ve chosen which workflow you want to digitally transform and migrate to the cloud, you can begin to choose new digital tools to replace outdated structures. As with any major change to your business practices, the first step to choosing a new solution is research.

Although the tools you select should be specific to the workflow you want to digitally transform, there are some universal boxes that every digital tool should check off for your business. This includes features like:

Ease of scalability so you can use the same tools as you grow
Integration capabilities with software and services you currently use
Services hosted through the cloud for greater accessibility and connectivity

Still not sure where to begin? Below, we’ve shared a few resources where you can learn more about cloud-migrated tools for Digital Transformation:

To learn about designating roles you can read through Techopedia’s insights on Project Management Software. This piece of technology gives businesses a digital platform to clearly define each project, update the status of each task at the individual or team level and track time spent on the project for more accurate invoicing. Many businesses already use a PM system, so migrating to a cloud-friendly alternative could be a simple way to begin the DX process.
To learn about improving connectivity explore W2S Solution’s article on 5G and the ways that IoT technology will impact mobile development for businesses. As the next and most advanced iteration of cellular networking, 5G will make powerful improvements to download speeds and mobile security and better sync all of your devices currently connected to the internet.
To learn about digitizing communication check out 8×8’s resource page on Voice over IP, which explores the similarities between cloud-powered telephones like VoIP and more traditional forms of communication. Because its services can grow or shrink to meet your current demands, VoIP is a great option for those considering to digitally transform their communication methods.
To learn about simplifying repetitive tasks visit HubSpot’s blog post on how workflow automation works. Automation for businesses exists to take the most repetitive, mind-numbing tasks that your employees face every day and have a machine perform them instead. This HubSpot article is a great resource for those unfamiliar with automation software, as it begins by examining how the different principles of business, such as human resources or financing, can benefit from automation.

Brace with Change Management

When your business is charting unknown waters, what strategies are guiding the ship in order to ensure you make it back to familiar land? Especially if your employees are not accustomed to using high-grade technology in their day-to-day work, you should instill the guiding principles of change management within your company culture to ensure that these adjustments go as smoothly as possible.

At the organizational level, there are several benefits to change management, but for Digital Transformation and Cloud Migration specifically, this change ideology helps ensure long-term success with your new digitized practices. This is because change managers help deter employees who are averse to new business practices, which enables faster implementation of technology and return on your initial investment. Change management is also an important element of DX strategy because, when practiced regularly, it will guarantee that you have the necessary communication channels in place to disseminate all essential information on these new digital tools.

Change management is equal parts proactive and reactive: that is, preparing for change before it occurs as well as acclimating to its aftereffects. Managing every aspect within your control is prudent to minimize the change and lessen its impact.

In the reactive stage of change management, you can prepare for tech implementation by rolling it out at a time and in an environment that works best for you. Schedule your tech changes during slower seasons of the year to give your team the time they need to explore these new tools and the many capabilities they offer. Similarly, you can pilot your digitized workflow at a small scale by selecting a few of your most tech-savvy employees to try out this new software and sharing their discoveries across the company.
In the proactive stage of change management, the most essential element to consider is effective and transparent communication. In the first few weeks of implementation, end-users and team leaders will need to coordinate with each other to ensure that the new technology is indeed a good fit for the company. Vetting concerns and criticisms through an established system of change feedback will help your organization receive the candid and critical insights that are needed to guarantee that you’re operating at 100% productivity and tech proficiency.

Has your business recently undergone a Digital Transformation or migration to the cloud? Share your experiences and insights in the comments section below.

Category: Digital Transformation

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