Watch this short video on how to delivery on digital transformation if you are serious about your business growth.
Delivering on digital transformation efforts and showing what your business is capable of requires that your business has a strong strategy and a clear plan. In this article, we’ll explore five ways leaders can do just that.
One key to success is a strong change story, which helps employees understand where the organization is headed and why it needs to change. It’s also important to foster a sense of urgency among senior leaders and people in transformation-specific roles about implementing the changes within their own units.
A digital strategy focuses on how to use technology to transform activities and processes. This approach enables companies to deliver new customer experiences that drive growth and brand loyalty.
Unlike traditional IT strategy, which focuses on deciding what technology to invest in, digital strategy looks for the right combinations of technologies and strategies to create new and meaningful ways to serve customers. It also aims to improve the entire business, not just a single department or technology area.
When leaders are able to make the right choices for their organization, they can deliver a successful digital transformation that will help them remain competitive. In order to do this, they must be as informed as possible about the available insight and be able to make smart investment choices.
One of the best ways to achieve this is to build a digital strategy that is visionary and can adapt as technology and customer demands change. This is called future proofing and can be a major advantage for businesses.
In addition, a digital strategy can help leaders make the most of their resources. For example, a strong digital strategy can save a company money by eliminating time-consuming manual data entry and human inefficiencies.
It can also improve efficiency by helping employees get work done faster and more accurately. For example, using automated tools like instant emails or chatbots on websites can allow customer service reps to serve more customers, while inventory management tools can help operations staff track shipments and save time.
Having a digital strategy can be a big step for any organization, so it’s important to start with a clear idea of what you want to accomplish. Having a well-defined goal will help you prioritize and avoid overcommitting to a project that won’t deliver the results you want.
A digital culture is a set of values, habits and practices that reflect your organization’s digital goals. Creating a digital culture takes time and involves experimentation, but it’s critical for getting the most from your digital transformation efforts.
One of the most important aspects of a digital culture is transparency. It’s a great way to foster trust and promote communication. It also allows employees to voice their opinions freely, without fear of retribution or retaliation from managers.
Establishing a transparent digital culture is essential for implementing new technology and improving workflow. Whether it’s through memos, daily emails, or forums, employees should be made aware of changes and allowed to share their concerns.
It’s also a good idea to set standards at the senior level. This ensures that security, data privacy and other issues are addressed before any new digital systems are implemented.
As a result, your company will be more likely to adopt a digital culture that reflects your priorities and business objectives. This will ultimately lead to greater success and help you become a leader in your industry.
Creating a digital culture isn’t easy, but it can be rewarding when you see your employees embrace new technology and collaborate across teams to improve their work. A culture that embraces digital is more likely to attract new talent and keep existing employees happy.
Creating a digital culture requires senior leadership and other managers to encourage innovation and creativity by setting clear expectations and using incentives. It can also require more training and resources to support your digital transformation effort, but the payoff is worth it.
Leaders need to embrace agile methods if they want to get the most from their organization’s digital transformation efforts. These methods can help companies become more responsive, do more with less, and better satisfy customers’ needs.
Agile is a flexible process that encourages team members to make frequent adjustments to products and processes as new customer demands are made. This flexibility helps companies respond quickly to changing market demands without compromising on quality.
The core principle of agile is self-organization, where teams and employees work together to reach a desired goal in an iterative process. This approach fosters team morale by empowering employees to create their own goals and self-manage their work.
A company that adopts agile methodologies can improve productivity and morale in many areas of the business, including strategy development, resource allocation, cultivating breakthrough innovations, and organizational collaboration. Using agile methods to address these problems can result in substantial improvements in productivity, employee satisfaction, and profits.
When it comes to implementing these practices, it’s important to keep in mind the risks and potential benefits. A rapid change to your organization’s processes and structures can disrupt current operations, so take the time to weigh up your options and consider how you can implement the best Agile systems for your company.
Once you’ve determined what changes are appropriate for your business, plan a pilot project with a short end date to start. These projects can be a great way to test new systems and get your team up to speed with them.
During the pilot project, set monthly or quarterly goals and reward your team members for their progress. Communicate frequently and use project management tools like Planio to keep everyone on track.
If you want to get the most from your organization’s digital transformation efforts, it is essential to invest in digital talent. Specifically, this means hiring and retaining tech-savvy workers who are ready to support your digital transformation goals.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to build a diverse workforce that has the right mix of tech and soft skills to support digital transformation. These strategies can help you attract a more diverse talent pool, increase employee retention rates, and improve overall organizational performance.
The problem is that there just isn’t enough digital talent out there to fill all the positions in every industry, so it can be difficult to find and hire people who are qualified for a particular role. This is especially true of those who have a combination of hard and soft skills, such as data engineers who are also customer-focused and team players.
A 2017 study from Capgemini and LinkedIn found that 54% of companies report that the talent gap is widening, and their company has lost competitive advantage because they could not find the right people for certain jobs.
This is where leaders need to step in. They need to be able to drive change from the top down in order to ensure digital transformation occurs.
To this end, leaders need to make sure that the organization’s culture is one that values change and a willingness to adapt. It should also be a place where employees feel comfortable sharing ideas and taking risks.
In addition to providing a healthy and supportive workplace environment, leaders must take the time to educate their workforce on digital skills that will help them thrive in the future. This can be done by offering online courses, such as Udacity’s Nanodegree program, which covers a wide range of topics from artificial intelligence to blockchain technology.
One way to get the most from your organization’s digital transformation efforts is by investing in the right tools. These tools will help you automate many processes and streamline workflows to increase productivity across the board. They also give you a competitive advantage.
According to a recent survey, companies that have implemented digital tools are more than twice as likely to succeed in their transformations than those who haven’t. This is because digital tools make information more accessible and provide self-serve technologies for employees and business partners.
These tools are also a way to track results and improve the customer experience. Using analytics, data can be used to create more relevant, personalized content that keeps customers coming back.
Another important part of implementing digital transformation is upgrading your organization’s “hard-wiring.” This involves rethinking your processes to make them faster and more nimble. Leaders can support this by ensuring that everyone is able to access the right digital tools and is empowered to work in new ways.
The right tools can also help you develop a more agile workforce by promoting continuous improvement strategies that allow teams to adapt and implement change quickly. This helps your organization stay competitive in today’s fast-paced environment.
Lastly, leaders should invest in digital tools that allow them to measure results and optimize the ROI of their digital transformation efforts. This will ensure they have the data needed to continue improving the strategy and ultimately grow their business.
Leaders should also use a portfolio approach to digital investment performance, taking into account the entire project rather than individual projects. This helps them to understand the overall impact of their digital investments and build tolerance for the risks involved.
At FutureEdge CFO, we partner with Private Equity firms and their portfolio companies in the manufacturing and industrial sectors to unlock liquidity, accelerate EBITDA growth, and drive valuation expansion—without disrupting leadership execution.
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The FutureEdge CFO Academy (“aka” Blog) is our central repository for all meaningful information and content that FutureEdge CFO cares for and supports, which we package and make accessible to anyone who visits our site to facilitate creative thinking and inner reflection. We aspire to cultivate a growing body of knowledge that is uniquely our own, but is acquired externally, and we share it to promote the values we stand for, but also to help make sound decisions and take the most effective action.
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