Strategy, organizational structure, management vision, human resources, and many such factors form the building blocks of an enterprise. If an organization plans to introduce any new strategy or technology, it needs to take a multi-channel perspective and ensure that it is meticulously implemented with everyone's acceptance. Implementing Digital Transformation services is a decision and a business strategy that can impact every factor within an enterprise. Hence, it is important that you watch out every step on the way. So, how vigilant should you get when starting off with Digital Transformation initiatives?
The Gartner 2018 CIO Agenda Industry Insights report shows that all industries rank digital business as one of their top 10 business objectives. Digital Transformation initiatives help organizations to integrate their various business propositions and activities with digital technologies. This helps to not only ensure business value, but deliver excellent customer experience. Nonetheless, enterprises have to go through continuous cultural change to adapt and nurture the value of Digital Transformation.
The report further states that, CIOs from the banking and investment services (26%), telecom (25%) and government (18%) sectors are placing digital business/digital transformation as their number one business objective in 2018. During his session at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2018 in Dubai, Jan-Martin Lowendahl, Research Vice President at Gartner mentioned, "Forty-seven percent of CEOs said they are being challenged by the board of directors to make progress in digital business, and this enterprise-wide focus on digital is also being felt by CIOs across industries".
Hence, proven that Digital Transformation, though a strategic decision, is a highly sensitive aspect for organizations. There are numerous factors to deal with and manage while adopting and leveraging digital technologies for business and ultimately to make them workable and result-oriented.
While every enterprise and CIO decides his/her own route, there are some ground rules and steps that we feel you must consider for successful Digital Transformation.
In order to make the required investments and build the right strategy, it is critical that the business objectives are explicitly discussed and accepted. Digital Technologies can do wonders for your business only if applying them brings relevance for you. Just adopting it for the sake of it can be disastrous and might even bring the required results.
Hence, the first step is to state the business objectives that you intend to achieve by leveraging a particular digital technology. For instance, building a Virtual Reality driven shop site makes absolute sense for a retail or ecommerce player. However, it might not make much sense for an industry that sells B2B industrial tools.
Taking a cue from what was mentioned earlier, investments in terms of technology know-how, tools, skills, and resources is needed to ensure successful digital transformation. It has to be a win-win situation, otherwise, the efforts might not see the light of the day. Hence, it is critical that you choose a technology that your business needs and will guarantee success.
