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Digital Transformation- Making Way For Better Business

  • Amruta Bhaskar
  • Jan 19, 2021
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Digital transformation is imperative for all businesses, from the small to the enterprise. That message comes through loud and clear from seemingly every keynote, panel discussion, article, or study related to how businesses can remain competitive and relevant as the world becomes increasingly digital. What's not clear to many business leaders is what digital transformation means.

Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers. It's also a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure.

Digital transformation will look different for every company, it can be hard to pinpoint a definition that applies to all. However, in general terms, we define digital transformation as the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business resulting in fundamental changes to how businesses operate and how they deliver value to customers. Beyond that, it's a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment often, and get comfortable with failure. This sometimes means walking away from long-standing business processes that companies were built upon in favour of relatively new practices that are still being defined.

Digital transformation marks a radical rethinking of how an organization uses technology, people and processes to fundamentally change business performance, says George Westerman, MIT principal research scientist and author of Leading Digital: Turning Technology Into Business Transformation.

Ideally led by the CEO, in partnership with CIOs, CHROs and other senior leaders, digital transformation requires cross-departmental collaboration in pairing business-focused philosophies with rapid application development models.

Such sweeping changes are typically undertaken in pursuit of new business models and new revenue streams, driven by changes in customer expectations around products and services.

For the past several years, companies have embarked on digital transformation journeys to counter the potential for disruption from incumbents and startups.

Retailers, for example, are answering Amazon.com’s march across every vertical by crafting algorithms to refine their logistics and ensure that anything from food items to beauty aids quickly make their way from local warehouses — before their store locations run out. To ensure merchandise makes it quickly across the so-called last mile, retailers will store more goods in their store locations.

The pandemic has forced IT leaders to reprioritize their strategic IT roadmaps, with many adopting cloud software for video collaboration and building apps that enable workers to enter offices governed by social distance practices and trace contacts.

Such low-hanging fruit is complemented by trickier implementations of machine learning (ML) software that helps enterprises to manage how products wend through supply chains disrupted by shifts to e-commerce.

Separately, such implementations don’t facilitate transformation. Rather, how these tools and other solutions are woven throughout an enterprise presents a clearer picture of a company’s digital fitness — and reflects its business priorities.

While emerging tech and revamped processes are crucial, having the right skills on staff is essential to any digital transformation.

Software engineers, cloud computing specialists and product managers remain key roles for companies seeking to roll out new products and services. DevOps leaders galvanize software development by merging development with operations, enabling companies to continuously iterate software to speed delivery.

Data scientists and data architects are also in high demand, as companies seek to glean insights out of vast troves of data, and transformations lean increasingly on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Plus, IT departments supporting business-wide transformations also require UX designers, digital trainers, writers, conversational brand strategists, forensic analysts, ethics compliance managers and digital and workplace technology managers.

Digital transformations are lagging or even failing for several reasons, including poor leadership disconnects between IT and the business, lagging employee engagement and substandard operations, according to a report from Capgemini Digital Transformation Institute and MIT Sloan School of Management.

But the key culprits of a derailed digital transformation are an obsession with big bang change, focus on cost-cutting as a business driver and failure to loop in the business.

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