3 Steps to Digital Success

Digital transformation is about fundamentally changing the way you operate to deliver value to your customers. Digital transformation involves rethinking how your organisation uses technology, people, and processes to develop new business models and revenue streams. The need for digital business models is driven by changes in customer expectations around products and services. Organisations that have achieved successful digital business models have outperformed industry average profitability by 25% (Forbes).

So, what are some of the key steps to successfully achieving a digital business model in your organisation?

1. Focus your process improvement efforts
2. Choose enabling technologies that are secure and easy to scale
3. Develop a consistent way to roll out change across your business

Focus your process improvement efforts

Many organisations make the mistake of trying to solve all their process issues at once. They go through long strategic planning processes to identify their strategic themes and initiatives. Typically, they will think about transforming the way the entire organisation works all at the same time through large scale business process re-engineering activities. This approach is rarely effective. You need to think about how you can develop a mindset of continuous improvement. In other words, lots of smaller changes that are implemented over time in a steady manner. It may be as small as improving one customer service process, or all processes in the customer service area. Prioritising where to focus your efforts with a decentralised model is the key to success.

Choose enabling technologies that are secure and easy to scale

If you’re thinking about developing your own in-house technology to stand out from your competitors and you are not a technology company then stop right there.

Developing bespoke in-house technology has three major pitfalls:

1. It is expensive to support and maintain.
2. It takes your focus away from your core competence.
3. It’s a tough sell. Convincing clients that your in-house technology will make a real difference to their client experience versus your competitors requires you to develop great skills in software sales and marketing.

The key to long-term digital success is to select technology that is fit for purpose and will scale as you grow. Partner with specialist technology providers across your industry that will continuously grow their ecosystems and bring you secure and reliable services. One key thing to remember though in this rapidly evolving digital world is ownership of data. When choosing cloud-based providers you need to be very clear about who owns the data and ensure this is reflected in your commercial arrangements. If you choose to move providers down the track you need to be able to easily take your data with you.

Develop a consistent way to roll out change across your business

Leading and managing change within any business can be challenging. Sending an email advising people of a change will not work. You need to have a clear understanding of your stakeholder groups and how they engage and communicate. Many organisations are unlikely to have change management specialists employed in-house, so think about how you are going to build the capabilities and skills of those who are delivering the changes on top of their day job. That doesn’t mean everyone has to be an expert in Kotter’s 8-Step Process for Leading Change but they do need to be equipped with some tools and techniques that will help them be successful
Again, consistency is key.

Consider the following:

• What are the impacts of the proposed changes?
• How will people learn about the change?
• How will you explain the benefits of the change?
• How will you get people to adopt the change?

Conclusion

As described in our blog on the major barriers to digital transformation, it is well documented that 70% or more of large transformations fail. The key thing to remember is that you don’t need to focus on big bang change to move forward with a new digital business model. Focus on transitioning and incrementally improving areas across your business that are being driven by changes in customer expectations