Digital technology has been a mainstay of most businesses for decades—and yet many everyday business processes have stayed largely manual.
To do their jobs, employees and business customers send and receive emails, make phone calls, update spreadsheets, and perform other manual tasks.
True digital transformation is about changing your fundamental business processes themselves—to harness the full potential of digital channels, platforms and technologies.
While it may start with a single business process, digital transformation encompasses the integration of digital technology into all areas of your organisation. This will fundamentally change your business operations and how you deliver value to customers.
On a higher level, digital transformation is about driving a cultural change in your organisation—where you constantly challenge the way things are, experiment with new ways of working—and learn valuable insights from your setbacks and successes.
Customer-centricity and user-focus should be at the heart of how you reimagine your processes for digital. You should rethink how to benefit the customer and then realign the value delivery processes with technology—to answer customer needs in the best possible way.
A key aspect of digital transformation is the ability to start replacing manual steps in your business processes with algorithms—automating the steps, rather than requiring a person to undertake that action.
This automation could use simple business logic—or apply more advanced machine learning and AI.
The long-term objective of all this is transforming your organisation to become a technology-enabled business. Such digital transformation has already moved ahead widely in recent years, partly as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With a large portion of the workforce continuing to work remotely using digital tools, organisations have realised there is no going back on this aspect of digital transformation.
Organisations in all sectors and industries are learning from pioneering tech companies like Amazon, Uber and Netflix.
One lesson is that old business models can be disrupted and subverted overnight by new customer-centric digital offerings. Another lesson is around the tremendous efficiency, scalability, agility and innovation that tech-enabled companies have unlocked.
Through digital transformation, your organisation can also gain these benefits—and be a competitive data-driven business ready for the future.
Read this digital story to inspire your thinking on a business moving from traditional processes to a digital platform.
