There is an abundance of opportunity in the world of digital transformation, despite its risks and challenges.
You can use an array of technologies within your company to improve customer experiences and operations. You can also use technology to enhance the company’s culture and facilitate the way your employees work with each another. This leads to better businesses that create more sustainable value for everyone in and outside of the organisation.
We’ve listed below some important changes that should happen from any digital change process to ensure long-lasting success.
1. Delight your customers
Today, most customer experiences take place online, so making sure your digital processes create amazing customer journeys will give you the clearest path to growth and a sustainable competitive advantage. Your customers should be your number one priority in any digital transformation programme.
2. Create a culture of innovation, responsiveness and long-term thinking
Digital transformation will fall flat without senior management working to fully understand the importance of technology. It’s not about how much money you spend on technology, it’s about creating innovation pipelines, thinking sustainably, strategically and with wider society in mind. Be open to continually thinking of how things can be improved and what can be achieved in the long-term.
3. End IT shadowing
Digital transformation takes a holistic view, so you should be able to iron out the wrinkles of existing IT silos which different departments may have created to overcome current IT solution shortfalls.
If you start by identifying the needs and requirements of all internal users, you can highlight the benefits and show where changes need to be made.
At the end of any digital transformation, the CIO needs to maintain the holistic view to keep IT budgets in check.
4. Power to the people
A successful digital transformation should empower teams to make positive decisions that can help them do their jobs better.
This will make the organisation nimbler, and a happier place to work. Issues will get resolved more quickly and more opportunities for growth will emerge faster. Incremental innovation, those small little improvements that teams can make (sometimes on a daily basis), will add to your competitive edge.
Taking this further with SaaS enabled platforms enables developers to embed IT in every part of the business. No longer should the IT department be banished to the dungeons or stuck in an ivory tower.
5. Allow for experimentation and failure
Innovation without experimentation is paralysis. Experimentation without failure (and a fair amount of failure) is not possible. To innovate effectively, teams need to push boundaries, take risks and learn from failure.
Create an environment where IT teams can get things wrong, learn from their mistakes and develop better solutions for the wider teams and the business as a whole. Enable a culture of transparency and learning, and remove the obstacle of legacy data to speed up the internal innovation process.
6. Put data front and centre
Digital transformation should give your organisation a central data-driven approach. Being able to analyse both structured and unstructured data sets and focus on improving the quality of the data that runs through the organisation is essential to ensuring better decision making throughout the company. Your digital infrastructure should be designed to unlock valuable insights and makes those insights available to the entire organisation.
7. Create tailored IT services
Design your digital transformation in such a way that you can move to a “as a service” model. Different groups within a company often have different IT needs and the “as a service” model means that you can flex to those needs more quickly and more cheaply. Creating tailored subscriptions to specific and differing IT services per department, will mean that it’s easier for you to keep an eye on spending and innovate with different solutions at different times in the business cycle. There should no longer be the need for lengthy and costly set up or issues with incumbent technology ownership.
The cost savings from a more flexible approach will free up resources for innovation and make it easier to demonstrate the ROI of any tech investment.
8. Become better at sales
Every company wants to become better at sales and managing strategic sales relationships – this can be achieved through “SaaS Orchestration”. The key to optimising available resources for SaaS are the sales relationships cultivated by the CIO. When multiple tasks are “strung together” to create larger workflows, you create better business sales relationships which have multiple benefits including:
- Reducing the costs of data security
- Improving the use of IT architecture from speed to productivity
- Simplifying and future-proofing IT architecture
- Improving connectivity throughout the customer ecosystem
- Leveraging customer relationships to access the latest product and service innovations at competitive prices
9. Take an inside-out approach to any change
Whilst it’s always beneficial to hire in expertise for digital transformation projects, remember that for change to embed itself properly within your company, you must make sure the right internal levers are in place. Senior management must take responsibility for the myriad changes that digital transformation can bring about and CIOs must have the vision and the toolkit to continually adapt, innovate and improve the organisation.
At The Siena Partnership, we work with our clients to recruit digital transformation teams and help their organisations achieve innovative, digital transformation success.
If you’d like to continue the conversation with our digital transformation expert Rob Saunders, contact him here:
Robsaunders@thesienapartnership.com
www.linkedin.com/in/robnsaunders/