In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the acceleration of digital transformation empowered businesses to embrace innovations and adopt new business models, creating new opportunities and breaking growth barriers. According to one McKinsey research, technology adoption is becoming a critical differentiator between leaders and laggards. But, to maintain the lead and continue to accelerate growth, the senior leaders need a clear strategy and understanding of the available technologies and their capabilities. In addition, they need to find the best fit between their business and operating models to implement technology solutions that will help them grow and scale up to leverage growth opportunities.
The research further identifies the key trends that will impact the growth of businesses up to 2050. These include:
- Next-level of process automation
- 5G connectivity
- Distributed infrastructure leveraging edge computing
- Quantum computing at scale
- Applied artificial intelligence
- Shorter development and deployment cycles
- Blockchain and other similar trust architecture
Technology Plus–Other Ingredients for Successful Digital Transformation
Technology is an enabler, a key aspect in transforming a business. However, its success depends not only on the investments in technology but other factors such as:
Vision: The top management must reimagine the business in the digital age with a vision and clear objectives to derive transformative value from the digitalization of the business. Create roadmaps to achieve the objectives, including business models, expanding markets, or monetizing data-based assets.
Talent: Hiring new talent is crucial for digital transformation. But at the same time, to maintain continuity of culture and purpose, retention of the existing talent pool and balancing become critical.
Technology: The modern technology environment focusing on agile development should be built on the two pillars of cloud platform and software delivery based on an engineering process.
Data: An assessment of the available data, its relevance, quality, and access, is mandatory for any digital transformation initiative. It requires committed data management to achieve a competitive advantage and make the project effective.
Adoption: Often, pilots may be successful, but businesses struggle to scale. It requires constant recalibration and realigning of the enterprise systems by tracking KPIs.
The Role of Senior Managers in Ensuring the Success of their Digital Transformation Initiatives
Despite its many benefits and the all-out efforts of businesses to leverage technology, less than 30 percent succeed in realizing their goals, and even less see it being sustained. Even in the industries with a higher level of digitization, the success rate is just about 26 percent, while in traditional sectors such as oil and gas, it could be between 4 and 11 percent.
Without a doubt, this requires total involvement of the leaders, especially the CEO in leading the way, encouraging collaboration for maximizing resources, providing a holistic vision, and establishing key metrics for transparency and measuring progress.
Five ways in which CEOs and senior leaders can ensure the success of their digital transformation journey include:
#1 Define a Digital Transformation Roadmap: Taking the leap from pilot to scaling up requires a vision with a blueprint with insights into key opportunities and threats. It requires an understanding of success stories in the industry the business operates in, the business models that can enable the transformation, and areas that can truly benefit from the transformation. Establish clear goals, timelines, and responsibilities for the various programs and also ensure sufficient capital. Integrate digital strategy with business strategy and be ready with Plan B in case of hurdles and roadblocks. Have the right resources and identify the best technologies to facilitate the journey.
#2 Hyperautomation to Unlock Digital Value: Automation is fast becoming identified as essential to improve productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency of digital transformation efforts while minimizing errors and lowering costs. This will free up resources to innovate and improve customer experience, thereby speeding up growth. In addition, Hyperautomation, referring to automation at the enterprise level, is set to improve delivery timelines to enable businesses to serve their customers faster and more efficiently.
#3 Security: With greater technology deployment comes a higher risk to security. The risks are also evolving along with evolving technology, putting the organization’s data and processes at risk. This can lead not only to financial losses but also damage to the reputation. Effective cybersecurity protocols need to be put in place using reusable APIs to keep a step ahead of the threats.
#4 Microarchitecture: Agility in development and the infrastructure is also essential to provide seamless digital experiences for customers and employees. Microarchitecture and containerization provide businesses with the flexibility to add, remove, and modify features using APIs while scaling up. Universal API management can enable the integration of hybrid and multi-clouds.
#5 A Single Source of Truth: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments enable distributing the load, but businesses also need a unified view of their structured and unstructured data. Machine learning and analytics can help to break down silos, facilitating integration and analysis of data to draw actionable insights for faster and meaningful growth.
Digitech Labs – To Set You on Your Transformative Journey
Digitech Labs, a new-age business and technology consulting firm, brings experience and expertise in facilitating digital transformation by aligning technology solutions to business needs and ensuring strategic outcomes. Our team can walk with you right from assessing your needs to create a vision, set KPIs, assess and enrich your data, automate processes, and implement solutions that can help you meet your goals of enhanced customer and employee engagement and faster growth.
The pillars of our digital transformation solution include:
- Cloud-native solutions for digital transformation
- Ensuring business outcomes
- Flexible, scalable, and customizable solutions
- Agile transformation with a cost-effective set of digital tools
- Sustainable transformation
To find out more, contact us now.