More than just a buzzword, Digital Transformation has been declared essential to organizations’ strategic growth. By focusing on integrating digital technology, into all aspects of business operations, it delivers significant value to customersthrough uncovering opportunities for change, addressing specific pain points and aiding the organization with overall improvement.

So how do you leverage technology to redefine the way you do business? More importantly, how does your organization reap the benefits of a digital environment? Let’s take a look at the fundamental elements:

• Customer Understanding– Many businesses have started using technology, such as big data analytics, to gain insight into market segments, trends and norms in order to better understand customer behavior and expectations
• Customer Touch Points–Understanding when and how the customer touches your organization and the various experiences they will have is important. The use of technology can improve the experience by ensuring that each touch point is consistent with the next.

Top-Line Growth– By integrating technology into various aspects of the business, organizations canimprove and personalize customer experiences thereby gaining customer loyalty and improving topline growth.

Digitally Modified Business–Companies who utilize digital tools to make content more accessible and shareable across the organization can reduce redundant work

• Process Digitization–Through Process Automation, industries will reduce time-consuming, manual processes to improve productivity, increase accountability and enable people to re-focus on more strategic activities
• Performance Management– With better visibility into operations and leveraging predictive analytics, Digital Transformation helps businesses to make more informed, strategic decisions

If you’ve attempted any Digital Transformation initiatives mentioned above, you’d know it isn’t short of challenges. In fact many of them fail. How do you ensure you embark upon a successful journey to Digital Transformation?

Our methodology breaks it down into 5 attainable steps.

1. Foster a leadership team with a vision andstrategy
Every successful Digital Transformation initiative begins with a compelling vision— that starts at the top.For many years, the IT Department had the clear leadership role in Digital Transformation. More recent data shows that the CEO, of more digitally mature organizations, leads such initiatives with an increase from 22% to 41%, versus the CIO with a decrease from 23% to 16%. CEOs must build a clear and compelling vision for change, set stretching targets that create the need to change and translate business targets into meaningful goals.

2. Communicate a leadership agenda for change
You can’t simply agree to do digital transformation.   Once, your vision of why and what must be achieved is created, the Communication plan and distribution of information throughout the organization is critical and cannot be unscored.  This ensures that everyone involved can understand the importance of the transformation. Without a clear understanding of its importance, it’s far too easy for the organization tofall back on old habits. At this stage, four communication strategies can help:

1. Brand your initiative
2. Stay on message
3. Model the behaviors you want to see in your organization
4. Sell your vision

3. Encourage a Digital Culture
A main reason so many change efforts fail is due to lack of support behind big ideas. Embracing a digital culture can be a challenge, as employees struggle to rally around consistent touchpoints, adapt to new technologies and new ways of working.

Leaders must be intentional in building a digital culture, including changing legacy technology and structures that hinder transformation. Organizations must move beyond traditional structures, processes and systems to change individual and collective behavior, including culture, mindsets and proficiencies, as well as team and group dynamics.  This is key to growth, as digital transformation eliminates silos and enables quick reaction to signals about customer needs.

4. Organize to enable agility
With an agile mindset and an iterativeapproach that can adapt to changes in the customer and competitive landscape, leaders must reinforce digital skills and technologies within the organization. Here are a few noteworthy approaches:

Embrace transparency– Each employee at every level of the organization should have a clear understanding of their role and purpose.

Empower cross- functional teams– Project teams for such projects should comprise of subject matter experts from varying areas of the business to ensure that all perspectives are accounted for.

 Fail fast –Agile development is an important model for digital transformation initiatives. This model accelerates the delivery of initial business value through a process of continuous planning and feedback. Sometimes you’ll fail multiple times before you find the right solution.

Be honest-Following the Agile framework is not just about trying possible solutions quickly, it’s about learning and growing quickly from those failed attempts. Encourage team members to truthfully share what didn’t work so the entire organization can learn from failed projects.

5.      Inspire collaborative, forward- thinking teams that embrace change

Shaping organizational culture is crucial but often overlooked. More important than employee awareness of the change is their understanding of why the change is necessary. Involving employees in every step of the way can be the difference in the success of your project.  Therefore, the recommendation is to builda culture where employees feel comfortable to share and focus on empowering them by eliminating bureaucratic decision making. Shift your focus to innovation and celebrate the iterative nature of progress.

Next Steps

Now that we’ve addressed your approach, let’s get you started.  Your ideal startingpoint is the Digital Transformation Model, from our partners, Laserfiche.This model easily breaks down, step by step, the roadmap from manual to digital.

Digitize Documents–This can be a daunting task depending on how many hard copy files you have. Do you have the right equipment to handle the volume and page types? Do you have a human resource to perform operations? What is your timeframe for getting this done? You may want to outsource this task.

Organize Documents –Now that you’ve digitized your documents, how do you search and retrieve them easily? How do you control access and track changes? A Document Management System with Record Management capabilities will be a good investment.

Automate Process–Through digitization and organization of the documents, you have laid a foundation for going digital. But it’s just the start. You can now work toward eliminating manual processes as paper based forms can be digitized along with an automated workflow. Repetitive transactional processes can now be defined and standardized, increasing accuracy and facilitating training for new staff. You can even integrate your documents with your line of business applications to make information available whenever and wherever you need it.

Streamline Process– Now that you’ve digitized your process, you can now extend the processes past what was possible before and can link cross-functional processes in a company-wide, end-to-end digital ecosystem. Continuous improvement methodologies, like Lean Six Sigma, can aid in improving cumbersome, complex processes to become more streamlined and simplified.

Transform Process –Once you’ve streamlined your process, further efficiencies can be put in place by leveraging analytics to align processes with business goals. Through process performance metrics you can identify risks and bottlenecks in order to make additional improvements.

Conclusion
The road to Digital Transformation can be pretty bumpy and winding but extremely rewarding. Plan your route and get your team on board for your progressive journey to increased operational efficiency, cost optimization, reduced complexity and risk and best of all –improved productivity.