“If the last decade has been the playground of the digital start-ups, the coming decade will see the emergence of the traditional companies as the digital giants.”
- Accenture Technology Vision 2014
Digital transformation is growing in scope and significance for businesses in all industries and of all sizes and the term 'digital' no longer applies as a subset.
As the growth and sophisitication of technology accelerates and consumer behavior changes, businesses know they need to take advantage of the opportunities posed by these changes.
We understand that digital transformation can sound like an enormous commitment of time and resources, but it doesn't need to. You don't have to commit to an 18 month pan-organisational programme of change - you can break a transformational project down into its component parts and focus on specific areas.
The key to delivering change lies in defining a process, identifying goals and building accountability into your plans. We have defined our own process working with clients on transformational projects, which we thought we’d share with you to inform your thinking.
The Driver of Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is being driven by the rise of sophisticated digital technologies and social media, creating a new type of connected customer. Customers are demanding more from their relationships with businesses. They want deeper engagement, a seamless buying experience and an ongoing relationship.
Customers have more control than ever before; they are sharing, researching and reviewing products and services online before even making contact with your business. Businesses need to adapt to ensure they understand what the connected customer wants, where to find them and how to keep them.
If you want to take a more detailed look at digital transformation, then read our earlier blog, What is Digital Transformation?
Our Process
We have defined our own process through delivering transformational change for the businesses we work with. Here is a quick guide to the stages we take our clients through.
1. Assess
We believe an assessment is a key starting part of any digital transformation project. We use a combination of interviews and analytics to understand our client’s needs and what they want to achieve. Based on this, we can make recommendations on key opportunities and identify risks.
2. Align
Using our recommendations from the assessment, we help build a transformational roadmap to guide our client through aligning their digital aspirations with their business goals. Creating a roadmap gives you a clear timescale, solidifies your goals and keeps your plans visible to key stakeholders.
3. Establish
This stage of the process refers to the programme of change you want to implement, using the roadmap to prioritise the changes you want to make. At this point you may want to consider the training needs of your teams, from social media and search to content production and agile project delivery, ensuring you have the skills in place to carry out your plans for change.
4. Transform
The crucial stage – implementing the changes. This is where your roadmap and prioritised change programme really come into their own; giving you a plan, a schedule and goals. We work with our clients as much as they need at this point, practically delivering change across all levels of the business.
Mind the Risk
We think risk is one of the most overlooked elements of digital transformation, and yet the point of planning or delivering transformational change is one where the greatest undetected risks might lie. You’ll notice that we mention risk a lot in our process methodology – risk alleviation is a major part of what we do.
If you’re considering digital transformation, identifying areas of potential risk is absolutely crucial, not only to the success of your project but to your business in general.
Common areas of digital risk might include:
- Customer data handling.
- Social media and email clauses in employee contracts.
- Digital supplier agreements and contracts.
To learn more about digital risk, read ‘Protecting Your Business When ‘Doing’ Digital.
The Opportunities of Transformation
We believe digital transformation is only going to grow in importance and urgency throughout 2014 and beyond. To find and keep customers, grow your online revenues and stay ahead of the competition, it’s imperative you take full advantage of the opportunities presented.
We hope explaining more about our process has helped visualise how digital transformation can work for your business, instead of disrupting it.
We’ll be running a blog series breaking digital transformation down to its component elements and showing you how it can work as separate, focused projects rather than one large programme of change. If this sounds helpful, subscribe to our blog for updates.