7 Ways to Accelerate Your Digital Transformation

The Seven Levers of Digital Transformation are actually quite simple– but each one is necessary for an organization’s successful digital transformation.

1. Create a Culture of Innovation

Most decisions made by a successful business were taken in the past, under conditions that might not hold true in the present, let alone in a digital future. The enterprise transitions from stable operation through experimentation, successful scaling, and back to stable operation while on a transformation journey. To reinvent anything, it is necessary to experiment and make quick changes up until the product or service approaches its breaking point.

In order to solve for scale, we must develop new methods to complement the existing technologies and methods. The transition from scaling to a stable state causes the creation of new structures or the reuse of previously developed ones from the enterprise's current knowledge base.

The goal is to preserve the enterprise's distinctiveness as it moves through each stage, which calls for a particular style of leadership and execution. Progressive businesses see the need, develop a distinct path for growth, and devise a compensation scheme for the groups that innovate, scale, and structure.

To effectively accomplish this, be sure to consider at least three different evaluation criteria: one for maintaining or retiring existing solutions and methods; one for experimenting with and succeeding in a fresh approach; and, finally, one for bringing the fresh approach to a scaled and stable state operation.

The fresh approach could occasionally call for bravery and cowboy techniques. Instilling a culture where individuals feel empowered by the data from instrumentation and will offer intuition while also being prepared to consider the cascade risks and consequences is worthwhile if the present culture is already relying on heroism.

Building a culture where challenging the status quo is a sign of a growth mindset is the first step in creating a learning organization. A culture where initiative is praised and teamwork is ineffective, a secure environment where risks are taken and errors are admitted, and a setting that does not discount intuition or denigrate those who raise complicated issues devoid of simple answers.

Key Takeaway to Accelerate Your Digital Transformation: A culture of innovation means creating an environment where employees feel empowered to take risks and try out new things. This type of culture encourages experimentation and creativity. Employees who work in such an environment are more productive and innovative than those who don’t.

2. Develop a Technology Capability

This lever cannot be seen as focusing just on the distribution of technology.

Technology solutions leave a digital trail of information about the client, the partner, and the business itself. Each business must build up a set of security and moral guidelines to guide how it uses this data footprint.

IT and operational technologies no longer drive efficiency or reduce costs. Continuous data collection, context-aware processing, and insight delivery are necessary for understanding how human and machine requirements and behavior are changing. This calls for fundamental adjustments to the conception, development, and use of operational, informational, and communication technologies.

IT expenses have always been acceptable when weighed against the advantages and cost reductions realized by enterprises. Many of the difficulties with commercial applications or the infrastructure downtime that IT could get away with.

Since outsourcing, internationalization, and just-in-time resource deployment have become commonplace, IT is no longer the only department claiming to enable agility or boost profitability. But the rate at which data is collected, analyzed, and transformed into insights is rising. Additionally, the potential data collection touchpoints are geographically dispersed and diverse. IT and operational technologies are used extensively in this change.

IT delivery change is a difficult task, much like any other transformation. The unique aspect of IT reinventing itself is that it has to continue to run the company, adapt to business change, and alter itself. Additionally, the employees will experience the cascading repercussions of any temporary loss of functioning or unanticipated results of any experiment. They also affect others who did not consent to absorb the repercussions of the enterprise's IT transformation activities, such as customers, partners, and suppliers.

To enable progress through the complexity, it is essential to keep the learning curve for persons outside the organization to a minimum.

Key Takeaway: Developing a technology stack that will help you achieve your goals is the first and easy step. Focusing on technologies that can make your business run efficiently and effectively misses the critical point of building an IT organization that can deliver.

3. Focus on Customer Experience

The cost and simplicity of accessibility of alternatives have lowered the barrier for customers to transfer suppliers in order to meet their demands. An organization can no longer have internal process silos if it wants to comprehend use needs and patterns, prevent conflict in their use, and predict the renew/refer actions. The intelligence about a customer's requirement and behavior is developed at the journal stage thanks to the instrumentation carried out in internal processes. Any intelligence gathered along the way should be transmitted as quickly and effectively as feasible with upstream or downstream stages.

The most frequent flaw in a strategy that we observe is a failure to recognize the need to connect all internal processes and creating a "known" feeling for the clients. The process of connecting the processes is only the beginning. It must be backed up by a suitable portfolio of investments in personnel, culture, and technology.

Is it truly necessary to comprehend customer behavior now? No. But as the quality of life has improved, the justification has changed.

Businesses that focused on intuitive design and maximizing the practical value of products were formerly quite rare. Businesses increased the functionality across a range of demographics and took into account production line equipment to enable the manufacturing and assembly of several items. This progressed to placing a higher value on productivity and usability requirements than the requirement for ecosystem integration. Experience is the one differentiator that businesses can maintain in a market where production, supply chains, and information expertise have all been democratized. Businesses that have accepted this fact work to provide services that emotionally connect with clients in order to create memorable interactions and enduring bonds.

Key Takeaway: Once you have identified your customer needs, you need to focus on delivering an exceptional customer experience. This means focusing on the user experience. How do they use your product? How do they receive the outcome? Never stop your thinking at website, buttons, and display.

4. Streamline Your Business Processes

Business processes are typically used to compose the Value Chain. Within the confines of an organization, these processes begin and finish. Using a manufacturing facility as an example, the processes begin with locating raw materials and planning to produce things that may be sold.

These products are sold and disseminated. Financial controls and incoming and outbound logistics support this extensive procedure. The supplier's journey, the purchasing team's trip, and the team that integrated the purchased items are all included in inbound logistics.

Business procedures and partner experiences could be involved. The trip of the sales and marketing team, partners, distributors, retailers, and customers is included in outbound logistics. The routes taken by the finance teams to recognize revenue and support compliance are their own.

Supporting the product or service is a further clear route. The employee experience is shaped by the business operations of corporate services, including finance, legal, sales, and human resources. Product development, cross-organizational cooperation, partner engagement, and customer engagement are the traditional four categories that make up a value stream.

The firm is unable to decide on efficiency improvements, consumer insights, or a plan to supply the goods and services that customers demand without a linked and instrumented business process. It is difficult to offer significant services through emerging technologies like bots, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, without data coming from across the company.

Key Takeaway to Accelerate Your Digital Transformation: Effective digital business processes are simplified. Build processes that match customer and partner touchpoints.

5. Build Outcome-Based Digital Products

Successful product development is not an additional responsibility for companies. However, it is difficult to create long-term value and ongoing differentiation because of rising expectations, ephemeral preferences, and unpredictable societal perceptions. Smart manufacturers and service providers understand the need for lifelong learning; they collect information through networked systems, interpret the customer's reality with empathy, and separate cyclical demands from long-term requirements. They are dedicated to creating a flexible business that is proactive, reactive, and responsive.

Digital twins and digitization are effective ways to improve an already-existing physical product or service. The method most frequently used to shorten the time it takes from concept to implementation is a creative fusion of contemporary technology. Building a new workstation using augmented reality, 3D printers, robotics, wood, steel, and other materials is one example.

The capacity to manage information in digital form is known as digitization. The result of digitalization and employing digital technology to control the process of producing, recording, and analyzing information to offer intuitive human-machine interaction experiences is known as digital transformation. A digital twin can be used for prognosis, diagnosis, and real-time monitoring.

Key Takeaway: Digital products are defined by use or outcome. Traditional physical product features (think leather seats) do not matter. Everything is the outcome and the journey.

6. Develop a Unique Configuration of Your Value Chain

The best strategies focus on making tough decisions about investments and process configurations, establishing symbiotic priorities that result in value for the client and business profitability. Responsible strategies use governance that is based on policy and hold themselves accountable for the results' causation.

Exercises in strategy analysis examine the business model, specify how it views disruption and success, and do not hold back when detailing the undesirable outcomes and actions that might bring down the company. They support the independence required for innovation. The Strategy for Digital Transformation also acknowledges that the journey's destination may not yet be clear and promotes learning, cross-company collaboration, and human-centricity.

The successful realization of a vision through excellent execution is only one aspect of strategy. It offers a decision-making framework for pursuing initiatives that is based on risk and effect assessments. Leaders who have kept a close ear to the ground and an eye on the developments in neighboring sectors develop successful plans. These executives actively connect with front-line staff members, pay attention to customer calls, and support recommendations for internal improvements.

These firms clearly focused on reducing the effect of business process friction, customer annoyance, and value proposition shortcomings when they defined transformation targets. Their passion is to meet the unmet demands of the loyal, price-sensitive client, not to sprint to the finish line. A moral strategy promotes the ecology of the business and supports culture. To detect internal and external patterns, organizational leaders must take a step back from day-to-day activities. An objective approach values both qualitative and quantitative data. It streamlines decision-making at the leaf level so that the rank and file may concentrate on the needs of the customers.

Key Takeaway: Every organization generates value uniquely. Digital transformation requires your company to develop a unique configuration and then support it through technology, customer experience, and business process.

7. Adapt Your Business Model and Ecosystem

When developing a strategy, taking a close look at the environment is a necessary first step. The idea of an ecosystem is not new, but today's environment demands that leaders look to the shared economy and crowdsourcing for inspiration.

An ecosystem is made up of many companies that work together to provide the client with something of value. Businesses are supporting open platform efforts that help them in three ways: speed up their time to market, stress test and develop the ecosystem, and boost their brand recognition.

Businesses are developing two different types of business models: those that focus on solving a singular, stand-alone problem and those that leverage an expanded value chain to handle a specific situation or result. Both will coexist, with each supporting the other. The firm that survives depends on how the owners of the businesses view value.

Key Takeaway to Accelerate Your Digital Transformation: Cultivate thoughtful partnerships based on the business focus of different partners. Partners must align with your customer experience and business process requirements.