Today’s workforce is more resilient and prepared to confront challenges than ever before. Organizations are not only surviving in the present, but they are also poised and ready to grow their operations and respond with agility to any unprecedented conditions in the long term, thanks to rapid innovation and expedited digital transformation. To stay competitive, relevant, and crisis-ready, a strong digital transformation strategy is now crucial.
The pandemic made it easy for businesses leaders who had been debating whether or not to embrace digital transformation. Nobody foresaw the changes COVID-19 would bring to organizations across all industries. Organizations that were unprepared for the unexpected halt in operations and the challenges that followed — such as restricted in-person interaction, remote working, and digitizing paper-based procedures – struggled to stay afloat. Meanwhile, digital enterprises were able to quickly and effectively adjust to shifting requirements.
The pandemic not only taught enterprises the value of planning for the unexpected, but it also presented a compelling case for speeding up digital transformation. It left no room for the justifications used by some business leaders to postpone technology investments.
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Here are four excuses that no enterprise should use to put off digital transformation:
Digital transformation is no longer an option for businesses due to dynamically changing business requirements and rising customer expectations. Instead, it’s a matter of survival in today’s competitive business environment, and it’s quickly becoming a reality.
Customers today are also fast adopting digital. They want businesses to be efficient and responsive, and they want immediate results. Furthermore, today’s employees expect the flexibility to work outside of the office. Meanwhile, organizations should be flexible in order to meet changing regulatory requirements. Speed is crucial to meet these needs and to meet the growing expectations of all associated stakeholders – employees, customers, and partners.
These new realities demonstrate that not only is digital transformation occurring at an unprecedented rate, but it is also here to stay. According to McKinsey’s 2020 global survey, “How COVID-19 has pushed companies over the technology tipping point—and transformed business forever,” companies have accelerated the digitization of their supply-chain and customer interactions by three to four years, and the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has increased by seven years.
Digital transformation revolves around customer experience, but that is just half of the story. The remaining half is made up of business processes that have been streamlined.
Manual out dated and siloed processes not only slow down the organization, but they also increase costs because maintaining broken, out dated processes is more expensive. As the world recovers from the pandemic, most organizations realise that their current business practises will no longer be viable in the new normal. Organizations have had to think on their feet to stay afloat while remote and hybrid work has become the norm, and digital transformation enables them to do so.
Enterprises realized the need of migrating their operations to the cloud as a result of COVID lockdowns, which made it imperative for them to provide secure remote operations. Following the pandemic, the adoption of cloud technology has grown at an exponential rate. It has allowed enterprises to function in a remote setting without sacrificing service speed or quality.
If organizations haven’t done so before, they should start by identifying the low-hanging fruit — operations that are suitable for initial automation roadmaps. Then begin to scale up. Transitioning to the cloud opens up a world of possibilities, from lower IT infrastructure costs to increased scalability to meet business demands.
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Employees are frequently apprehensive about their jobs as a result of digital transformation. However, the reality is that digitization and automation have produced a pool of new work prospects. The nature of work has unmistakably changed, yet the number of job openings has increased in the digital age.
When digital transformation is done correctly, processes become faster, more efficient, and accurate, allowing employees to focus on more strategic tasks that need emotional intelligence, judgement, reasoning and one-on-one interactions with consumers.
It’s critical to educate employees about the need of digital transformation and show them how it will benefit them in their existing roles. Employee up skilling and reskilling is another excellent technique for ensuring that the workforce supports digital transformation activities.
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Prangya Pandab is an Associate Editor with OnDot Media. She is a seasoned journalist with almost seven years of experience in the business news sector. Before joining ODM, she was a journalist with CNBC-TV18 for four years. She also had a brief stint with an infrastructure finance company working for their communications and branding vertical.
