Digital transformation

Davey Winder introduces a game-changing idea that could revolutionise your processes – and your revenue

“Digital transformation”? Sounds like a marketing buzzword...

There’s an element of hype to it, for sure – but underneath the marketing speak, the idea behind “digital transformation” is a practical one that every business should take note of. It’s about embracing technological changes, cultural changes, process changes and so forth to improve the way you do business.

And what does that actually mean?

It means taking a fresh look at the practices that underpin your business. They may not have been updated in many years – and even if they have, it’s a good bet that both technology and customer expectations have moved further. That means there are almost certainly some big changes you could make to deliver better value to your customers and more efficient workflows for you.

So it simply means taking advantage of new technologies?

That’s a part of it, but digital transformation is a more fundamentally radical idea. It’s not so much about evolving your existing processes as forgetting about them entirely. If you focus instead on what you want to achieve, you may well find that the latest technologies and resources open up new and better ways to attain your goals. The key in many cases is to break out of the silo mentality that keeps the back office separate from customer interaction, and to look for ways to link up previously separate processes – to join the technological dots and deliver a business that is more flexible and efficient.

So we’re not talking about a purely digital transformation, but a complete reorganisation of the business?

It could go that far. The key thing to understand is that technology enables the transformation, but the goal isn’t itself technological – it’s not about moving things into the cloud and deploying data analytics software or whatever. It’s about shaking up the established mindsets within your organisation, from top to bottom. If that sounds suspiciously airy, be assured that it’s a means to a very down-to-earth end: industry analyst Gartner believes that digital transformation can help businesses achieve the holy grail of generating more revenue while reducing costs.

So what might such a project look like in the real world?

Many businesses’ data processing practices are ripe for a bit of transformation. The instinct is always to hang onto as much data as is legally possible, but this throws up two challenges: how do you store an evergrowing mass of data, and how do you make the best use of it? If you don’t have good answers to those questions, you’re going to end up with ever rising costs for an asset that delivers little real value. I mentioned above that digital transformation isn’t just about the cloud or data analytics, but here’s a case where those technologies can enable a worthwhile transformation: moving your data into the cloud can be cheaper and more flexible than an on-premises server infrastructure, and analytics can help you gain much more value from the data you have by extracting business insights such as customer behaviours and market opportunities from otherwise dead data stores.

Won’t rewriting our existing processes be a nightmare for staff?

If your transformation is handled properly, the fallout should be positive. For example, enabling employees to work collaboratively with documents helps them save time and be more flexible in their processes – which should give them greater job satisfaction. It’s natural to be cautious of any culture change, but digital transformation ought to deliver an uplift for both the business and the workforce.

“You may well find that the latest technologies and resources open up new and better ways to attain your goals”