Digital transformation is defined as the technological transformation of an organization to help improve its business operations.
It involves the complete transformation of all areas in an organization such as its business processes, culture and customer experiences.
Organizations have been using digital transformation to improve their businesses for years now and the realized value from that investment is enormous.
A great example of how digital transformation has helped organizations survive unpredictable times is March 2020, when the whole world was forced by the global pandemic COVID19 to start working from home.
Video calling tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype and Google Meet became the most important tools in the world.
Which impacted organizations that were dependent on the physical presence of their employees in the office.
They had to start scrambling to make the digital leap to laptops and remote connections and make the digital transformation overnight.
While organizations that already had remote working technologies in place were able to make the switch and maintain their productivity levels.
So how does an organization digitally transform itself ?
Organizations have business processes that have built and refined over time but these processes might not be able to help the organization attain its organizational goals.
Once the organization identifies the need for a change, they would have to ensure that their employees understand the need for this change and get their “buy in”.
This is important because if the organization just changes its business processes but does not include its employees in this change, the change might not be successful.
So it is important that while the organization is changing its processes, that they do not forget that their employees are also also an important part of that change.
In order to get the employee on board with this change, the company culture would have to change.
Changing the company culture is a process known as change management which involves the education and transparent communication of information to ensure that they employees feel heard, appreciated and respected.
This change management process needs to be carefully done because while the executive board might make the strategic decisions, the employees do the operational work.
So if the employees don’t believe in the change they might unwittingly lead to the digital transformation process failure.
Digital transformation also involves a review of the business processes to identify ways to make them more effective and efficient.
This involves the identification and documentation of the current business processes, analysis of the current state and visualization of the future state.
While the current state is being analyzed, sources of waste would be identified and they could include manual repetitive tasks which are not value adding to the customer.
These manual tasks are ideal candidates for process automation and that is where the technological part of digital transformation comes into play.
For example: One of the tasks that the purchasing clerk has to do every morning is check their inbox for vendor invoices, if there are any invoices then they would have to download the attached invoices and manually copy the information in the attachments to a spreadsheet.
This task is mundane, repetitive, prone to errors and time consuming, so it would be an ideal candidate for process automation.
Once the task is automated, the purchasing clerk would be free to do more value adding tasks such as processing the vendors invoices and purchasing goods and services.
This in turn would improve their productivity and make them more efficient.
Another way digital transformation can be used to help the organization attain its business goals is via its interaction with the customers.
In the past organizations had to analyze lots of data with the help of spreadsheets to identify trends and patterns.
Then they got applications like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to help them view their whole enterprise and utilize the generated data to make informed business decisions.
Then they added Business Intelligence tools like Power BI and Tableau were added to their ERP applications to help make their data analysis even better.
But all this data was received after the interaction with the customer so there were missed opportunities to improve the customers experience.
So organizations needed to find a way to improve their customer interactions in real time because they realized that this could lead to brand loyalty and increased profitability.
Now that is where Artificial Intelligence software were used to create chatbots which could be trained to quickly respond to customer inquiries and improve their customer experiences.
An example of such software include Microsoft Power Platform.
So in summary, digital transformation can be used to improve every aspect of an organization and though it might not always be a welcome change, it can be used to help the organization to attain its goals.