Traditional businesses that used to sell products through their brick and mortar stores were forced to shut down due to lockdowns. This forced business owners to establish their online stores where they can sell products. To protect their employees from getting infected by the virus and abide by social distancing rules, most organizations asked their employees to work remotely.
Jan Erik Aase, Director and Global Leader of Technology Research and Advisory company ISG’s provider lens research said, “Companies knows that digital transformation can help them respond to disruptions in a much better way irrespective of whether they are caused by health crises, political uncertainty, or market fluctuations.”
With this pandemic showing no signs of slowing down, we can expect the uncertainty to continue in 2021. This would force businesses to accelerate their digital transformation journeys. Before you do that, there are certain things you need to reconsider.
In this article, you will learn about seven important things you need to reconsider to digitally transform your business successfully.
- Goals Alignment
Due to this pandemic, businesses are forced to shift their focus towards fulfilling the emerging and evolving needs of their customers, employees and partners. Even though every web design company already does a great job at it, other businesses have to work on it and improve on that front.
Since COVID-19 forced most businesses to rush through some initiatives and make hasty changes, they were unable to follow the standard procedures and took the level of care required for such initiatives. Some businesses have even diverted from the technical roadmap they were planning to follow. Since things have settled down a bit now, it is the best time to reconsider and realign your goals.
- Digital Transformation Strategy
2020 caught many businesses off-guard and even led to the closure of thousands of businesses. Businesses that have taken steps to stay relevant and survive before this health crisis even emerged were the ones who got out of this pandemic unscared.
Your organization’s adaptability and response to changes prove to be a difference-maker. App development Dallas was the prime example of this. They diverted their attention to health, communication and e-commerce apps which were growing in popularity.
Now, it is time to create a comprehensive digital transformation strategy that includes your brand story. Convert your successes and failures into a captivating story that shines a light on the reasons why you want to digitally transform your business and what steps you need to take to achieve your goals.
A digital transformation strategy answer one of the most important question, “How your business can reposition itself to stay relevant in a digital economy?” It is important to adjust according to the changing consumer behavior in order to succeed in today’s fast-paced business world.
- Cultural Readiness
One of the common mistakes businesses make during digital transformation is they put lots of emphasis on the technology side of things thinking that it is the only or more important part of digital transformation. The problem starts to arise when they start ignoring the organization in which technology operates. Organizational culture conclusive for digital transformation is essential for successful implementation.
Companies with rigid business processes and poor maturity levels are the ones who fare the worst in terms of digital transformation adoption. You need flexible business processes and a high maturity level along with a great organizational culture to pull it off successfully.
- Impact on Employees
Implementing large scale changes across enterprises will always result in some backlash. Your employees will oppose it because they are accustomed to legacy systems and don’t want to go through a steep learning curve associated with new technologies.
You need to make them understand the benefits of digital transformation in your business. If your employees are struggling to cope up with the digital transformation, you are better off deferring your plans. You can also adopt an alternative strategy for implementation. If you are implementing new tools, make sure that they don’t create any new data silos and create problems for your remote workers.
- Training and Development
Rob Wiley, Senior Vice President of Formstack, which is a workplace productivity platform thinks that “It is important that companies roll out any new tools in a way that employees and customers have adequate time to adjust to using the new solution,”
Give your employees time to get the hang of new tools and let them settle in. Implementing new tools will be a daunting challenge especially if you don’t supplement it with training and development. Invest time in training employees on how to take full advantage of new technologies.
- Use Cases and Approaches
If your digital transformation approach revolves around a particular technology instead of a business problem then you should rethink your approach to digital transformation. Always start your digital transformation journey from business problems and find a solution to that problem with digital transformation instead of being the other way around.
Develop use cases that help you clearly describe and define that business problem. It can also help you in understanding how users interact with your solution and what experience will they have when they do so? You need to stay laser-focused on the business problem your product solves instead of thinking about the list of features.
- Consolidation Prospects
There is a lot of planning and consideration which goes into successful digital transformation. Due to this pandemic, this was not possible as businesses have to rush towards new rules. This could result in inconsistencies and redundancies, which you can eliminate. Streamline your technology stack and take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way.
If you look closely, you might find an opportunity for vendor consolidation. For instance, if you have three different vendors, you can consolidate them into one. This will help you bring down your IT costs drastically and save a lot of money.
Which factors are you re-evaluating for digitally transforming your business? Let us know in the comments section below.
