Digital transformation has enabled organizations to make rapid adjustments while relying on their cloud architecture, modern security protocols, and agile company culture. It provided them with a wide range of business-enabling technologies that support vast new work-from-home environments while establishing virtualized business transactions and interactions. But there are a lot of companies, non-profits, and governmental entities that are still lagging in their digital initiatives, which is why they are struggling to adjust to the year's rapidly changing economic and social environment. It acted as an alarm for C-suite officers, warning them to stop dragging their feet on their digital transformation efforts since the companies that embraced digital transformation didn’t suffer much disruption in that environment. In the wake of COVID-19 disruption, more than two-thirds of boards of directors accelerated their digital business initiatives, and about half foresee changing their organizations' business model.
What is Digital Transformation and Why is it Important?
Digital transformation is all about the infusion of internet-based tools and technologies into your company's processes so that you are able to meet and actually anticipate the wants and needs of your stakeholders involved. In short, digital transformation is a business transformation that's enabled by technology. It allows companies to work faster and in innovative ways to better compete in the marketplace. Leading examples of the same include cloud computing and mobile technologies supported by modern security software. They offer secure, reliable access to business applications anytime, from anywhere. Not only this, but automation is also there to speed up processes and reduce errors. It eventually shifts human workers' attention away from boring repeatable tasks to higher-value actions that machines are not capable of handling. Hence, it helps create a better work environment with improved employee and customer experiences. Another example can be taken of artificial intelligence that further helps organizations transform their identity by analysing data sets to pinpoint problems that include fraudulent behaviour and learning from that analysis in order to identify new opportunities that can help increase revenue.
What are the Benefits of Digital Transformation?
Organizations that are still undergoing transformations mostly measure the success of their digital initiatives against various business metrics, just like they would measure the return on investment (ROI) for more conventional projects. But the expected ROI corresponding to digital transformation programs differs a lot from one program to another and from one company to another. This is why there are a number of overarching digital transformation benefits that are all interrelated and interdependent.
Increased Efficiency and Productivity
Digital technologies are an ideal way to increase the efficiency and productivity of your organization as they help you speed up processes and streamline operations. For instance, RPA can outperform humans by multi-fold factors. Now, we have bots in the market that can complete tasks 20 times faster than humans, and they generally don't make errors as people do. We can also use business intelligence software and data analytics tools to collect and analyse data at a high speed and with increased accuracy that can’t be matched by humans ideally.
Better Resource Management
As companies progress on their digital transformation journey, they're constantly replacing legacy systems serving individual business units with modern IT architectures that are designed to consolidate processes while seamlessly enabling the flow of data across all departments. This kind of end-to-end digital technology approach not only helps CIOs but also other executives to eliminate duplicate and superfluous technologies and their associated costs. Not only this, but on-demand computing resources and as-a-service platforms can also be used by organizations to optimize their technology spending since it allows them to manage the computing capacity that can be used as and when required. They won’t have to pay for excess capacity just to handle rare peaks in usage.
More Resiliency
Using digital technologies to build a digital culture while embracing the change, is the only way for organizations to be able to quickly adapt to shifting market forces. It helps companies, non-profits, and other organizations better weather normal business ups and downs while anticipating larger and once-in-a-lifetime disruptions. The pervasive use of digital technologies like cloud computing supports organizational resiliency since it delivers built-in redundancies and elasticity.
Greater Agility
Digitally savvy enterprises can not only react to change but they can capitalize on it too. Digitally mature organizations can quickly scale up or down as per the demand since they have the technology to their rescue. Modern software development methodologies, such as DevOps and Agile, are also playing an important role in collaboration among teams and allowing them to rapidly create and roll out new features and functions that meet client needs and expectations
Improved Customer Engagements
Digital transformation completely changes what you know about your customers. It also changes the type of relationship you can form with them. It helps make them stronger and more intimate by allowing you to collect, store and analyse customer data that can be used to learn more about each of your customer and better cater to their needs. Other benefits offered by digital transformation include increased responsiveness, greater innovation, faster time to market, increased revenue, and continued relevancy.