3 Essentials to a Digital-First Approach in Digital transformation

As businesses recover from the pandemic, savvy CIOs understand that their enterprises must continue to speed intelligent automation initiatives in order to succeed in the new digital-first era.

The majority of digital transformation training and content today takes a technology-first approach. However, by focusing on technical specifics and applications, the importance of new business models and corporate strategy concepts in developing a unified strategy and roadmap for transformation, is frequently overlooked.

According to a 2021 Forrester Research, many Fortune 500 companies may not survive this year, and the number could be possibly as high as 20%.

But a technology-first strategy can feel like an impenetrable, jargon-laden foreign language to many CEOs who are not digital natives. So, what’s next? How can CIOs maintain momentum and guarantee that they have a long-term digital-first strategy in place to satisfy post-pandemic customer expectations? How can they simultaneously make their CEOs aware of the severity of the situation and convince them of how technology can help.  Prioritizing where to focus and spend in order to develop a digital-first landscape is the first step in the digital transformation journey.

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Begin digital transformation at the ‘people’ level

Leaders will have the opportunity in 2021 to facilitate long-term business transformation and build a digital-first culture. Companies, on the other hand, face the challenge of providing employees with the tools and abilities they need to succeed in a digital-first world. According to Forrester’s data, almost 30% of an employee’s experience score is based on technology and how it enables and empowers them.

By finding best practices and sharing them across an organization, firms can use digital intelligence tools like task mining to automate and streamline operations. This reduces waste; allocates human resources more efficiently, and allows for quicker responses to changes or issues. It finally helps CIOs in seeing and understanding how processes actually work and interact with one another.

It’s also critical for leaders to know what their teams want and what they are doing with technology. Employee expertise can be supplemented with digital assistants, chatbots, and conversational AI, which will allow for faster access to consumer data. The ability to supply employees with the data and information they require through technology will make their lives easier and improve their experience.

The customer journey should be prioritized

Many people want to talk about technology first, but businesses are truly attempting to impact the human (customer), starting with a dedication to their experience dealing with their organization.

Process mining and the creation of a digital twin of the processes can help organizations understand how customers engage and complete transactions. Businesses will be able to detect where workflow solutions have been applied for the short run, and where the greatest bottlenecks exist, as well as how to correct and improve them. They will also be able to provide continuous monitoring and predictive capabilities. Organizations will be better able to map the customer journey and provide a better experience if they understand how processes work.

Invest in the edge

Edge computing puts computing closer to the source of data, and it will be necessary to meet customer expectations. 5G networks and IoT devices will be able to process AI capabilities at exponential rates, as well as use machine vision to capture and analyze documents, allowing customers to perform more self-service transactions. With a mobile bias or an interactive chatbot, enterprises will be able to migrate from artifact-driven experiences to conversation-driven experiences. After all, millennials and Generation Z demand to converse in real-time.

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Finding the proper partner to put digital-first concepts into reality without the requisite tools and capabilities in-house is difficult for many. Because partnerships are so important to digital success, it’s critical to keep “team fit” in mind and make sure the business goals are well-considered and linked with the goals of any possible partner or stakeholder.

Companies must choose a partner who can help them develop a hybrid toolkit strategy that solves their specific problems while also leveraging the cloud, possibly including no-code/low-code platforms with drag-and-drop features to help reduce complexity and deployment time. Companies can also collaborate on a small project to see how well their working relationship works.