How to Embrace Digital Transformation for sustainable business growth?

The digital transformation era for business has begun, affecting everyone. From a small startup to a multinational corporation with thousands of employees, embracing digital transformation has become necessary for businesses of all sizes.

Today many companies rely on technology to enhance their business capabilities and weed out any inefficiencies in their operations. All that amplifies the benefits for the customers and allows the business to stay ahead of the curve.

So exactly what makes digital transformation so important, and how can it help a business propel itself to the top? What ways to bring meaningful change in your business by leveraging digital transformation? And what tools and platforms can help a business in the quickest time? This article is the right place to get some clarity on how you can enable and embrace digital transformation

5 reasons why embracing digital transformation is important

Disruptive technologies have always been a hurdle for companies. Be it the avenue of the industrial revolution or the somewhat more recent example of a touch smartphone, only those companies that accepted the "New Normal" survived and thrived. Digital transformation is a similar challenge that companies today have to overcome and adapt to.

Businesses must address digital transformation to get a competitive advantage. There are five key ways to embrace digital transformation, including reducing time to market, better solution quality, improved security, and optimizing employee performance. Working on these areas of digital transformation will help businesses meet the ever-changing needs of their customers and employees.

The changing landscape asks companies to adhere to new and demanding business standards. These demands can be met only through implementing organizational-wide digital transformation. You can expect the following benefits after adopting digital technologies in your daily business operations.

1. Reduced time to market

Historically, companies had a lot of time to work on introducing their products and services. The slow and steady approach was a common strategy for companies. New products and improvements could take months, if not years. While high-quality expectations were the norm back then, companies could get away with operational deficiencies. Adopting this approach is no longer possible. Companies have found themselves facing local as well as global competitors. Any delay in the product's launch and arrival to the market could cost companies to lose a significant portion of customers to other alternatives.

Similarly, companies have to focus on continuous operational improvement. That includes continuously working on product development. Any time delay must be eliminated, especially if the company wishes to remain competitive. Digital transformation allows you to streamline developing and introducing new products to a global market. It eliminates slow manual processes and replaces them with automation to improve response time and allow companies to develop their solutions more efficiently. Companies need to leverage a digital transformation to address technology infrastructure deficiencies in their organizations to minimize cost and time to market.

2. Enhanced solution quality

Digital transformation doesn't just allow faster processes. But it also allows you to improve the quality of the solutions you come up with. Through digital transformation, you can create a supportive infrastructure for your organization that helps in faster and better collaboration between departments and employees. By incorporating digital technology in your organization, you can use data to get relevant and actionable insights. These insights enable your organization to be responsive and react quickly to problems or issues that may arise.

Only through a digital transformation can you equip your organization with the tools needed to develop quick solutions and fixes. It allows organizations to connect with end-users and consider their feedback. Organizations can measure and react to complaints and design better solutions to customers' problems.

It's not just technology companies that can benefit from using digital transformation to design their product improvement strategy. Instead, other organizations, such as restaurant owners or retailers, can use data to analyze customers' buying behaviours and proactively address issues.

That's not all. The ability of a company to develop and enhance previously offered solutions has become a cornerstone for success. Firms that leverage an innovative mindset, continuous improvement, and development to reduce cost and waste can capture a sizable market share. That's because customers prefer cost-effective products and high-quality customer experience. Without a digital infrastructure, focusing on an innovative mindset is impossible.

3. Improved security

The security threats that organizations face daily might surprise anyone unaware of what happens behind the scenes of business operations. Data security is one of the most prominent concerns of IT leaders worldwide. A focus on data sharing and digital technology increases, and the threat of security vulnerabilities increases. However, incorporating rigid controls regarding access and security can lead to high inefficiency and underperformance.

For example, imagine a scenario where you lose an exciting opportunity for the company just because you couldn't get the necessary approvals. To avoid situations like these, companies have to design organizational-wide data security, which is the same across all departments. Moreover, as companies around the globe move towards hybrid working models, businesses have to account for security on personal devices as well. A comprehensive digital transformation empowers you to do all that and more.

4. On-demand services

One way that companies have now started to differentiate between themselves is by offering an impeccable customer experience. This approach has led to high customer expectations regarding service and product delivery time. Customers expect companies to leverage their operational efficiency to provide on-demand services. Moreover, companies have to be easily reachable online to stay competitive. Online pressure has become proof of reliability and impacts customers' level of trust.

Depending on your digital strategy, you can be your customer's first or last preference. Be it for on-demand services or detailing a customer journey, a successful strategy today requires a reliable digital infrastructure. Companies need high levels of flexibility and efficiency to meet the standards of their target market. Moreover, keeping up with a shifting landscape without a robust digital framework is next to impossible, as employees require modern tools to perform as per the industry average.

5. Effective employee performance

Most employees are looking for productivity tools to help them perform better at their jobs. Combine the need for modern tools with the new hybrid working model, and the approaches businesses can take to improve productivity and motivation become far more complex.

Digital transformation provides an avenue for addressing the concerns employees have. It provides an opportunity for you to rebuild the foundation of your company and move core departments, such as HR and Finance, away from mundane manual tasks. Relying on automation, productivity, and communication tools such as Slack, Teams, KissFlow, etc., is one way to incorporate digital technology into your organization. These platforms allow better collaboration between teams and departments, faster decision-making, and more efficient strategies. Moreover, they're also practical tools for maintaining employee engagement.

Tips to enable your digital transformation journey

There's no standard guide for implementing a digital transformation in your organization. The process depends entirely on what your company needs and what goals it has to accomplish. A vital part of any digital transformation strategy is to divide the entire process into 3 main stages.

Analyze your business

Digital transformation is a vast and complicated journey. It's also continuous and has no end in sight. If you step in blindly without considering what your company needs, you'll have high costs and no results to show.

Implementing a digital transformation in your organization involves a deliberate strategy. The first step you'll have to take is to recognize the scale of the project. It's better to determine what is digital transformation your organization and what it will need in terms of cost and time. After that, It's best to break down your business operations, such as client support, logistics, and more. Try to identify and address the problem areas of your business that require immediate improvement.

You also have to ensure that your business starts operational during the whole process. Any digital transformation can not impact the end-user experience negatively. Analyzing your business operations before taking any massive step will undoubtedly lead to a successful integration of digital technologies.

Consider your employees

One major hurdle is strategizing digital transformation for employees. It's imperative to take your team on board and to consider their concerns and queries before committing to a digital transformation. Avoid layoffs or pay cuts, but instead, focus on proper role assignment and communication. Change management is a vital part of any business transformation. The same is true for a digital one. Your employees need to embrace the change and benefits of a digital transformation rather than fear it.

Taking employees' input and feedback before and during the transformational process is a well-recommended strategy. This approach would connect your team with the organization and allow better collaboration and a seamless transition.

Moreover, you should also arrange different workshops and tools to train your employees about the new tools and systems you're implementing. If your employees aren't aware of how to use digital technologies, you'll only make your operations inefficient. Your employees would then be able to leverage the functions of the technologies to deliver better performance.

Plan and implement

Once you have identified your organization's pain points, it's time to plan and implement the new changes. The best approach is to clarify and define your long-term goals and aims. After that, you should clearly understand what tools you're using and what results you expect from them. Moreover, once the success factors have been determined, you'll need digital transformation KPIs to measure and monitor the level of success. Tools such as Kanban and Google analytics can let you monitor and measure the success of your strategy.

The perfect digital transformation platform you can ask for

Implementing a digital transformation within your organization is easier said than done. It's a challenging hurdle to overcome, and if done wrong, it wastes time and money. Unsurprisingly, most companies face immense difficulties in implementing organization-wide digital transformation initiatives. However, with KissFlow, the process doesn't have to be a challenge.

Kissflow's digital transformation platform is an ideal gateway to the latest digital technologies. It's a comprehensive solution that targets multiple organizational factors to improve and increase productivity and efficiency. The low-code, no-code makes it easier for companies to adapt to digital transformation as it can be used easily by your IT and business teams.

Kissflow offers a highly customizable solution that can be implemented as per your organization's needs. It allows you to execute a digital transformation around your company's goals and metrics.

Read More on Digital Transformation:

1. What is Digital Transformation? Definition & Types

2. Why does Digital Transformation Fail? 

3. Enabling Digital Transformation with Cloud Technology

4. 9 Digital Transformation trends to follow in 2023

5. Gartner's insights on Digital Transformation market growth