Digital Transformation
The combination of customer needs and innovation is the formula for disruption. Today is the world of technology. Legacy companies are at risk of digital disruptions. With new cutting-edge technologies emerging every day, and new businesses with technology enabled right from their start, legacy companies are vulnerable to losing the market. To be relevant, legacy businesses need to always be on top of changing market scenarios and hence their business models. Digital transformation is one of the important business models to stay relevant with time and ensure a strong market position.
The digital transformation for legacy companies is broadly of four phases.
Identification
It all starts with an understanding of all the business processes.
What are the processes across different departments on which the company works? What processes have to be redefined? How are they interconnected to each other?
Listing all the processes gets the whole picture of the company’s operations. Reimagining the processes is the key to transformation. This is the step to identify specific goals and objectives a business wants to achieve through digital transformation. These could include improving customer experience, increasing operational efficiency, or entering new markets.
Evaluation
After the identification of all the processes that have the potential to be digitally transformed, the next step is evaluating the technical feasibility and the investment. All the processes are not of equal importance. Some processes are high-income generating, whereas some might be bottleneck processes. Also, the budget for transformation is not unlimited.
Businesses need to assess current technology infrastructure and skill sets. This includes evaluating existing systems, data, and the organization’s overall digital maturity. According to the strategy of the business, each process would have priorities. Based on the priorities and the budget at the given time, the transformation has to be executed accordingly. At last, it’s not a one-time process but a continuous improvement one.
The outcome of this step is to determine the processes to be transformed and its budget.
Implementation
The actual implementation starts after deep research into the technical feasibility and availability of finances. This step can include installing additional hardware equipment & sensors, getting third-party data via integrations, and new software configurations. In short, all the possible means are required to collect and share the data between systems.
This process is not an easy one and can have multiple challenges.
It also includes hiring new resources for the projects to execute.
Feedback
As mentioned, digital transformation is not a one-time process. And certainly, it is not a monotonous process as well. It requires a good amount of continuous effort from all the stakeholders. After the implementation, the outputs from it have to be measured. Whether there are any improvements in the systems or not, in either case, one needs to find where the system can be improved. Digital transformations are meant to get minimum turnaround time, better customer service, and savings on costs, which will ultimately lead to becoming an edge over the competitors.
In short, this phase involves regular tracking and assessing the performance of the transformed processes and technologies against the defined objectives, and adjusting strategies as needed to meet evolving goals.
Check this article to learn about the challenges of Internet of Things implementation.
Leave a Reply