Why Digital Transformation Is A Roadmap To Success

Organizational change is never easy but achieving digital maturity through digital transformation can be a particularly arduous journey, for even the digital-first companies. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has made digital transformation an even-more urgent need, companies need to also morph iteratively so that they can keep up with the speed of emerging technologies. It’s a process of continuous learning and pivoting to change with an evolving competitive landscape. Despite the critical nature of speed in digital transformation digital transformation takes significant financial investment and time.

What Is A Digital Transformation Roadmap?

A digital transformation roadmap is a collection of steps that organisations can follow in order to attain short-term and long-term business goals with the usage of digital technology.  The roadmap starts by understanding business needs and finding gaps in the existing system to build a strategy that avoids these gaps. Digital transformation is quite a long journey and even with a solid strategy in hand, organisations have to be patient with the process. These must put in effort for a long time to see it succeed.

What Digital Transformation Means for Business?

Digital transformation translates into opportunity: opportunity to innovate a niche or optimise business processes, to create new products as well as services, and to try out new communication channels that better reach and interact with audiences.

Part of digital transformation encompasses the adjustments needed in order to remain relevant and competitive in the current digital landscape. With new threats in cybersecurity, changes in data and privacy compliance, and user behaviours that prove big evolutions in business environments; it’s vital to spot potentially game-changing technologies and be quick to take action to keep a competitive advantage.

How To Avoiding The Key Pitfalls Of Digital Transformation

Most digital transformations begin with high aspirations for a step change in performance. However most companies never realise those aspirations. They move through the three main phases of blueprinting the high-level strategy, activating the initiatives as well as minimum-viable products, and scaling across the organisation. They confront a reality which falls short of their hopes. In our experience, a lot of this disappointment may be traced to insufficient rigour regarding defining the digital strategy during the first phase. Frequently, organisations lack sharp insight on the key opportunities and threats.

Gradually Deploy New Technology

Today, we live in what’s considered to be a ‘Hybrid IT World’.  Journeys towards new digital systems come within the organisation and current systems. Supporting – as well as maintaining – existing applications and infrastructure need to be considered when implementing new technology. If you are integrating current technology or merely replacing it, you will need to handle it with care.

During implementation, focus on communication, change management as well as consistency. You don’t automatically need to ‘re-invent the wheel’ however improve and replace current processes for optimisation.

Deploying new technology takes time and maybe done overnight or ‘out of the box’. Getting the correct team to correctly implement and challenge processes are not only imperative however vital to your success. Onboarding and deploying may be a long process and take many months or even years upon years.

Each department may be at different stages and also face different challenges. Change management is critical to your deployment. The ability to measure, track as well as analyse changes which are made allows you to gather more data to enhance processes and optimise deployment even more.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Do you want to become a digital transformation expert? If you do then you need to do our Digital Transformation Course. Follow this link to find out more.