Four Things to Remember Before Embarking on a Digital Transformation Journey

While digital transformation is appealing and a must to thrive in today’s business environment, achieving success with it is difficult if organizations do not know where to start.

CIOs and their counterparts have been striving to implement digital transformation initiatives within the finance sector over the past few years, especially in 2020 and 2021. This should come as no surprise as the potential benefits of digital transformation range from improving efficiency as well as cost savings to delivering a seamless customer experience while driving revenue growth. But, not all digital transformation initiatives go as planned. 

According to industry experts, most digital transformations fail to take off. This results in organizations losing a massive chunk of cash. For organizations operating on a stringent budget, it can be particularly devastating. Therefore, to achieve success with their digital transformation, organizations should ensure that before they take on such a big venture, they should first evaluate their present situation, while ensuring the appropriate changes are made to it.

Here are four key elements organizations CIOs should consider to make sure that the right digital culture is in place for supporting digital transformation:

Acknowledge transformation is difficult

While building their digital transformation strategies, organizations should acknowledge that it is not going to be easy, as employees react differently to change. 

Organizations should manage changes with appropriate plans while addressing all teams and employees. If not, it can morally hit organizations while implementing a new management system. Also, hiring employees that are familiar with it instead of retraining and reassigning the existing employees can damage the relationship between teams leading to a high staff turnover rate along with a decrease in productivity. 

Also Read: Three Strategies for Successful Onboarding of Employees

Even though there are obvious benefits to hiring new individuals, for an organization to be truly geared towards its employees’ well-being, the existing ones should be given a chance for retraining and reassignment. 

Empower employees 

Lack of empowerment often leads to a string of issues of different projects that can ultimately delay the digital transformation. Also, if the employees are constantly criticized for their ideas, they will not be open or feel empowered to lead the projects. To achieve a successful transition, managers should be confident to delegate as well as show employees that their feedback matters.

Organizations should transition from simply providing defined tasks to employees to actual employee empowerment. By showing confidence in employees, organizations will feel empowered at work, give stronger job performance, show job satisfaction as well as a commitment to the organization. 

Open to Experimentation

Organizations should recognize they may encounter a certain level of failure while moving ahead with their digital transformation project. While a celebration for achieving success cannot be undermined, an organization should also support the celebration of failures. This will assure employees that failures are part of the journey and are acceptable as long as they advance the level of the organization towards innovation and experimentation.

Also Read: Three Cornerstones of Digital Transformation Success

Improvement is a continuous process

Improvement and enhancement are iterative processes; it begins with small but incremental shifts in the mindset of senior management across the organization. This will enable employees to evolve while developing a cross-functional understanding of what results the organization will yield at the organization level.

With these guiding principles in mind, transitioning to digitalization should be more manageable on a company-wide level.

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