What motivates the digitization and digital transformation of business today?
Analyzing how Digitalization can be a game-changer for businesses across all industries.
Let’s face it! As digital technology advances and plays an ever-increasing role in our daily lives, companies must keep up with the times.
From a broad perspective, the choice is simple: keep up or fall behind.
That said, understanding what digital transformation means for your company, on the other hand, requires a little more investigation, euphemistically saying.
So, first things first, let’s define what Digital Transformation is.
What is Digital Transformation?
When you integrate digital technology into your business, performing fundamental changes in technology, culture, operations, and value delivery, it means you are going through what is known as digital transformation.
This process also requires a change of mindset that companies undergo to become more modern and keep up with the technological advances that are constantly emerging.
To better capitalize on emerging technologies and their rapid expansion in human activities, your business must reinvent itself, radically altering all of its processes and models.
This transformation requires a shift in focus to the enterprise’s edge and a more agile IT infrastructure and processes to support that edge.
It also entails removing legacy technology, which can be costly to maintain and changing its culture to support the digital acceleration that comes with the transformation.
However, digital transformation is more than just developing new tools, mechanisms, devices, and services to make our lives easier in some way.
When it comes to the demands of a new reality, technology advances faster than ever before, the term is widely used in the corporate world.
In other words, the context surrounding the new modernities is more important than the technologies themselves.
As a result, implementing digital transformation in your business is more complicated than simply adding new functionality.
Because technological products and services are accompanied by a manual and operate on subjective logic.
You must also include cultural change, which is a more difficult task because it involves many variables and the human side.
Some aspects that you can consider to be pillars of the digital transformation are as follows:
- Consumer focus: Understanding your consumers’ desires and preferences have never been easier. As a result, it is critical that this information guide all aspects of your company’s operations.
- Constant feedback: Every company has made, committed, and will continue to make mistakes. Because there are more and better ways to get feedback now, it is necessary to capitalize on flaws to qualify the product.
- Delivery time is reduced: All of these processes — from manufacturing to launching the product, receiving feedback, and correcting directions as needed — must be completed as efficiently as possible.
- Adapting to Change: Because contexts change all the time, your deliveries must be agile. As a result, your company must be resilient while also making its processes more flexible.
Analyzing the main digitization and digital transformation drivers today!
We have our customers at the heart of any business change, or at least we should have, considering that customer satisfaction is how we make money in business, right?
Now, digital technology and innovations are driving many of today’s customer expectations, and as a result, the always-connected client is always on the lookout for new opportunities.
Our customers want new things from us when they see them elsewhere. And if we can’t provide them with what they want, they’ll find someone who can.
The digital age has connected and empowered today’s customers. As a result, they increasingly want and expect the same from the businesses with which they do business.
Thanks to the digitally connected world, customers can now compare prices and switch from one brand to another more efficiently than ever before.
The benefits of Digital Transformation
Some of the most relevant benefits of digital transformation have already been discussed, such as encouraging innovation and creativity, agility in delivery, and adapting to constant changes in the market and consumer habits.
It is worthwhile to discuss another benefit, which is, in fact, a means of achieving the goals outlined in the digital transformation process.
We’re talking about breaking down communication silos, which is a prevalent issue that most administrators and managers are unaware of.
They occur when barriers prevent communication and collaboration between employees from different sectors of the same company. They are also known as organizational silos.
They form for various reasons and, in some cases, give rise to rivalries between areas.
This is illogical because everyone is in the same boat, striving to meet the company’s mission and objectives.
One approach to digital transformation that helps break down silos is the encouragement of multidisciplinary teams.
Last but not least, when done correctly, digital transformation has a particular benefit: cost reduction — and, as a result, an increase in profit margin.
This is due to the lean philosophy’s ideas and an increase in team productivity.
Employees are not exploited in this way; instead, they are guided to work smarter — some methodologies even encourage self-management.
Analyzing the root cause of this shift in consumer behavior
All industries have been affected by digital transformation across the world, and whether companies are generating revenue through customer service, digital media, or physical goods, these technological advancements are transforming manufacturing, distribution, and customer service processes.
Let’s have a look at the main drivers of this shift in consumer behavior:
Social media and mobile devices
In the last years, technology had changed customer’s expectations of how businesses should interact with them.
Today, customers prefer to do business with brands that personalize their shopping experience, and they believe buying from innovative companies is critical or essential.
The bad news is that customers can quickly look for new companies to acquire since these new technologies allow them to take their money elsewhere.
Employee empowerment on workplace experience
With more “consumer-level” technologies making their way into the workplace, enterprise applications have begun to take design and functionality from the consumer world and its user experiences empowered by digital technology.
Connected and Digitalized Employees
Millennials, more than any other subset of the workforce, are early adopters of the digital mindset. Their digital-priority mindset is applied in digital transformations to empower all other employees.
Employees today thrive in environments that enable collaboration, access to information, and work from anywhere, just as consumers look for companies that are ready and willing to connect with them 24/7 via social media and other digital channels. In this scenario, digitization is a valuable ally for the empowered employee.
Digitalization as a game-changer for businesses.
Digitization is crucial not only for meeting customer expectations and empowering employees, but it can also help businesses perform better.
The efficiencies provided by going digital — for example, having a comprehensive database shared across the company, leveraging customer data to create personalized messaging and service strategies, and enabling employee connectivity from mobile devices — can free up teams to acquire and retain more customers.
Digital innovations and the industry transformation
Emerging technologies like AI, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud analytics, and sensors are propelling advancements in everything from consumer goods to the automobile and truck industry, where manufacturing processes have been optimized to adapt to changes in consumer demand.
Real-time visibility into supply chain logistics has been provided by cloud-based software. Also, mapping the customer experience with AI and machine learning technology provides valuable insights to help product planners, marketers, and budgeters do their jobs more effectively.
Together, these and many other digital innovations are changing how we do business from every conceivable angle.
Conclusion:
At this point, why should your businesses embark on the digital age?
You can’t deny at this point that digital transformation is synonymous with business transformation. And change is a good thing if you consider that the main driver for this change is the goal to improve the lives of employees and customers.
The drivers I’ve presented in this article are some of the most important reasons for the significant changes occurring in your business today.
They give you an overview of how you can improve your capacity to remain competitive in your market if you use digital transformation to streamline production, expand distribution, create a better workplace for your employees, and improve your overall customer experience.