Driving Digital: The leader’s guide to business transformation through technology

For many companies, innovation is a key to success. The ability to adapt to new opportunities and challenges in the marketplace is crucial for companies hoping to remain successful.

In the last decade, many organizations have come to realize the importance of a digital business strategy.

Digital transformation has been defined as: “The ability to effectively utilize technology to enhance the customer experience and make life easier for people.”

This means digital transformation ensures that customers and employees get their work done fast and smoothly and with very less human intervention when dealing with your business processes.

Even as technology advances, the ability to transition into a digital business remains difficult.

The question of how to become a digital enterprise is one of the most difficult challenges for the twenty-first-century company.

Businesses are transforming to digital businesses, yet many of them are struggling to realize their full potential. This whitepaper will reveal what digital transformation really means for your business.

So here is the leader’s guide to business transformation through technology:

In today’s fast-paced world, businesses must be quick to react to changing market conditions and adjust their business procedures accordingly. Digital transformation is an ongoing process.

So businesses have to follow a strategy that gives them flexibility, space to learn and grow.

Here comes agile digital transformation.

Agile Digital Transformation

Agile approach is an iterative design process in which project requirements and solutions evolve over time.

Agile Digital Transformation is a proven methodology that enables digital transformation to happen consistently and safely. This new methodology is the result of research that shows continuous innovation creates a more agile and flexible organization than any other transformation methodology.

It’s about being able to change direction quickly, adjust to change, and innovate.

Benefits of using agile digital transformation methodology

• Flexibility

Agile allows businesses to be more flexible. The Agile methodology encourages you to embrace change and experiment. This means that you shouldn’t be scared to try new ideas and see what happens. The Agile process encourages experimentation, which means you need to test out new solutions before committing to them.

Agile is a great fit for organizations that want to maximize their chances of success while avoiding being locked into a single plan.

• Minimization of risk

The agile strategy reduces the chances of risk.

It offers transparency, collaboration, and feedback through a process of continuous improvement. Continuous testing and clear communication after each sprint ensure each and every issue is addressed.

• Value delivered on regular basis

Businesses don’t have the time to spend months planning, designing, and developing an entirely new system. In the past, enterprises have waited up to a year to see the results of digital transformation, and it often ended up being a long, drawn-out process that produced little in the way of tangible results. But, this isn’t the case anymore.

Agile strategy is based on small frequent releases.

As a result, operating in an agile manner ensures that meaningful outcomes are given in smaller, more frequent pieces, rather than waiting months for an outcome.

• High Quality

In an agile digital transformation strategy, the testing process starts early on in a project lifecycle and is a continuous process. It will assist in quickly identifying and resolving issues.

• Complete transparency

With Agile, each team member has access to the daily project status. Progress reports and daily updates help make sure everyone is on the same page, and can easily communicate with each other.

You’ve heard of the power of a shared vision, and the agile digital transformation strategy is perfect to help you share that vision with your team.

The Five Principles of Agile Digital Transformation

• Begin with the vision of transformation

Creating a compelling vision for your organization is an essential first step to digital transformation. Your leadership team must define a vision that guides the organization through the process of planning, designing, and implementing the changes necessary to succeed in this new world. A digital transformation requires an organizational, cultural, and technological change. But it also requires a new way of thinking about the organization itself. Without visions, it is difficult for organisations to track their progress and make necessary adjustments to achieve the intended goals.

• Emphasize the importance of building digital customer engagement.

Digital transformation is not about introducing new technology. It’s about delivering better experiences to customers by leveraging new technologies and combining it with other elements of the customer journey such as marketing, support, or product offerings. Customers are not just buyers, they are also creators of value.

• Bring in Secure Digital Platforms

In order to succeed, companies must use the appropriate digital platforms to develop a strategy to transform their business model and grow organically. While choosing a platform, organizations should adopt a modular approach to choose the right combination of functionality, tools, and other features that will best suit their requirements.

• Create Insights Using Data

Data and analytics are critical to digital transformation. The key to the success of this transformation is to gain a better understanding of customers’ behavior and how they react to the digital experience. Analytics can help companies discover patterns in their data, gain deeper insights into their processes and workflows, and ultimately make better decisions. Data is the biggest asset to a company if used correctly. To know more about what you can do with data read our blog “Get more out of your data! with Data Fabric”

• Take an Iterative Approach to Digital Agility.

The problem with traditional business models is that they need to make long-term decisions based on customer needs which may change at any point in time. These long-term decisions are made in the absence of customer feedback. As a result, projects take months to deliver and end up being over-budget and late. It’s a vicious cycle.

Iterative design means continually learning about the audience through data collection, and making adjustments to the product. Agile development is an iterative approach to software development that involves small releases often with testing in progress.

• Transform into a Data-Driven Organization

“Data-driven transformation” simply means making better or more efficient use of data.

Data has always been closely interconnected with digital transformation.

Data is a valuable asset to any organization.

The first step in digital transformation is to take control of the data and turn it into actionable information that will aid business processes.

Businesses are challenged by managing, protecting and securing their data while optimizing business value.

The first problem that a business may face is siloed data. When you have siloed systems, it typically means data is scattered and is not immediately usable.

With the right tools, you can unify all your data and put it to work for you. That means improved collaboration, real-time decision-making, and the ability to make better business decisions at every level.

Why do you need a data driven organization?

1. Helps a company identify what is working and what is not in their business model.
2. Helps in Understanding Customer Behavior and Improving Brand Customer Experience.
3. Helps in measuring business performance.
4. Helps in identifying new business opportunities.
5. More accurate predictions.

The Role of Organizational Culture in Digital Transformation

A large part of digital success comes from a company’s ability to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape.

Your company can become a leader by creating an organization that can adapt quickly to innovation. A workforce that is able to adapt to change is essential for a company’s digital success.

How To Use Change As An Advantage — The first step in dealing with change is accepting it. Once you accept it, you can start to make the most of it.

Start with the proper training:

And then, of course, there’s the issue of training. Since many people resist change (and especially major changes) simply because they don’t know how to do something new, it’s your job to teach them. One way to do this is by writing articles or web copy (as in this case) which explains the benefits of change in simple everyday terms. Give them lots of relevant, simple exercises and have them discuss their solutions and how they overcame the training obstacle. Remember

Everything takes time:

Besides training, the other main ingredient in the successful change formula is.. Anticipating And Preparing Your People For Change: You have to work quietly and patiently with the team to overcome those obstacles one by one. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is the part where true leadership skills are most needed. This is where you must rely on your “gut feel” about your people.

And don’t forget this: If you try to force change upon people who are unprepared, you’ll only create disaster. Don’t be in a hurry. Train them first, then nudge them. And always remember… The First Rule Of Change Is… You Must Be Prepared Yourself!

Change isn’t automatic. It doesn’t happen overnight. You have to be ready for it. You have to have the proper training, you have to have the right people on board, and you have to be ready and willing to nudge and guide and train and encourage as necessary.

Handling Objections Effectively: Many people have a hard time with change because they are fearful of what it might bring. Consequently, one of the most important jobs of a leader is to help his or her team overcome these fears. In this case, that means doing whatever is necessary to ensure the process of change is as smooth and painless as possible. It also means anticipating and dealing with the typical objections his or her team will have and then finding creative solutions to those problems. The primary job of any good leader is to make sure his or her people are as happy and fulfilled as possible.

The first step in change management is to identify the barriers that keep people from changing their behavior. These are known as “objections” and it is important to understand them and learn to deal with them effectively. This is where the real work of change takes place.

To conclude, a good leader doesn’t just accept change; he or she works actively to encourage and facilitate it.

Conclusion

There are three main drivers of change. These three drivers will drive the rest of your organization and they are: Culture, Technology and Business Models.

Digital Transformation will be a major factor in every company’s future. Businesses must adopt this new digital approach to remain competitive.