How to digitally transform your business for achieving digital excellence

The last two decades have witnessed ‘digital transformation for achieving digital excellence’ to become one of the key organizational goals regardless of the industries, the business belongs to. While most of the organizations consider it as one of the key goals to achieve for their success, when it comes to its execution, they fail. Their failure is attributed to them mistaking digital transformation as being a ‘one-time change’ they, as a business, need to make.

“Digital Transformation is a journey, not a destination”

Digital Transformation is thus, not just a ‘one-time change’ for the organizations to make. But it is a long term strategic change, a continuous journey of transformation the business needs to embark on, for reaping its benefits in terms of achieving digital excellence.

What exactly then, is Digital transformation?

By its very definition, digital transformation of your business is application of digital technology to radically enhance the performance and access to markets for the organization. So, the experts across the industries are making use of the digital advances such as big data, data analytics, social media, mobility and smart embedded devices along with smarter and more advanced usage of the traditional technologies such as ERP to help them improve the customer relations dynamics, internal business processes and the over-all value generated.

While most of the organizations believe that digital transformation can be driven through technical excellence, in order to effectively undertake it, the businesses need a little more. So, while it is a fact that an organization is not going to achieve digital transformation without technical excellence, it is not the only factor that counts. Apart from advancement in technology, a business needs to consider a big picture approach and a knowledge of its priorities in the long term along with the processes and infrastructure to support the execution. The business needs a well-rounded strategy to accompany technology for effective execution of digital transformation.

So, here are some considerations for you before creating a holistic digital strategy to help your business get closer to digital excellence:

1) Ascertain your business objectives

Before you even begin with it, you need to be sure of your key business objectives and whether your organization is more oriented towards technological operations or the innovative business tactics. Once you know where your business lies on this spectrum, you can realign your business processes, people, technology and the operational perspective to support your business objectives.

2) Ascertain the digital objectives of your organization

You ought to chalk out your digital strategy in line with your organizational strategy and both of which need to be embraced right at the top level of your organization to ensure its consistent implementation at each level. For this it needs to be clearly understood that digital strategy of a business implies an altogether new way of doing business and not just making a couple of superficial changes to technology and/or marketing of your business.

3) Ensure alignment between technology and strategy

While you assess the current alignment between technology and business strategy, you need to find the gaps and the potential ways to fill those. To accomplish this, it makes perfect sense to list out all the technological requirements of your business along with the need for skilled work-force to implement those technologies and execute the related business processes. In this process, you can identify the skill gaps and the ways to fill those though training and development or the recruitment process. You also need to find out if your IT department comprises of only the technical enablers or if you also have some technical experts who are strategic visionaries.

4) Assess IT processes to align your priorities with the digital strategy

In light of your newly devised digital strategy, you need to assess the relevance of all your IT processes to see what all needs to be prioritized. Whether it is people you need to invest in, for improved internal or the support processes or it is technology or the project management processes that you need to improve on, in order to fulfil your digital objectives. Asking such success-critical questions will bring in clarity about the technological and operational priorities for your business.

5) Fine-tune your business IT strategy when necessary

Despite the rigorous exercise and continuous efforts made in the direction of achieving digital transformation, the businesses ought to understand that implementing a digital strategy is, in essence, an on-going process and may require you to tweak your approach every now and then according to the results obtained and the need of the hour. Specially, in an ever-changing technological landscape, your technological and business priorities are more likely to change than not, over a period of time. So, the digitally excellent organizations know well in advance what to expect from their digital strategy and that how frequently they might need to adjust their strategy to effectively meet their business objectives.

Why your business needs expert hand-holding through its digital transformation?

Every business is unique and so are its digital transformation needs. The big data research for one particular business may not exactly serve as a starting point for another one, even if belonging to the same industry. It requires profound experience at assisting businesses with their digital transformation and in-depth industry-wide business insight to really know what would be the best strategy to adopt for any particular business, if they were to embark on this endless journey. And considering the fact that it is a long-term strategic investment on the part of any business, the process efficiencies also become equally important. Only an expert digital transformation agency can hand-hold you through the complexities a digital transformation may bring with it, helping you get it right, the first time.

The team at Carmatec comprises of digital transformation specialists who efficiently hand-hold your business towards the achievement of digital excellence with their sharp business acumen and having extensively worked on similar projects.