Surgical and medical devices require the speed and accuracy of powerful cloud and database technologies. Healthcare workers providing patient care and support are improving mobile and monitoring options so users can feel safe and confident with self-serve mobile technologies. Over the last 12 years, she has created and managed content for many SMEs and global brands.
As we have seen in traditional change efforts, clear communication is critical during a digital transformation. More specifically, one key to success is communicating a change story, which helps employees understand where the organization is headed, why it is changing, and why the changes are important. At organizations that follow this practice, a successful transformation is more than three times more likely. A second key is senior leaders fostering a sense of urgency for making the transformation’s changes within their units, a practice where good communication is central. Other results suggest that when communicating change stories, successful organizations tend to relay a richer story than others do.
Meet Your New CFO: A Futurist and Strategic Business Partner
New technology innovations in the industry require a disruption of traditional workflows. Changing processes that have been around for years can be overwhelming, and businesses often don’t know where to start. Digital transformation consulting can help enterprises evaluate their traditional processes and determine primary areas for change.
Once you’ve started your digital transformation, remember that the McKinsey senior partners wrote, “Digital is not a destination.” It’s more of a never-ending journey. Embracing digital transformation and adopting innovative technologies allows you to deliver superior customer experiences that cement customer loyalty and enable you to expand and grow. When it comes to digital transformation, it’s tempting to fixate on the digital part—the platforms and processes—rather than the transformation part. The idea that you could just buy the right software and instantly increase productivity is appealing.
Why digital transformation matters
This applies to both B2C and B2B sectors as consumer behaviors, knowledge consumption and processes have now changed. No digital transformation can be successful without coordinated action across all these areas. Prior to the onset of digital transformation, a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) was captain to an organization’s ship charting their finance journey. View our case study on how Sutherland drastically improved the internal operations and automated key processes for Genesis Financial Solutions.
We hope you agree that digital transformation is inevitable and necessary, but you may not think it’s urgent. Maybe sales are strong, your customers are happy, your employees are productive, and now doesn’t seem like the time to embark on a resource-intensive project that will shake up your operations. Despite the overarching nature of digital transformation, organizations can indeed measure how well they’re doing on their digital transformation journey and whether their investments are delivering returns. A survey released what digital transformation means for business by management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in October 2020 found an increased use of remote work and collaboration, advanced technologies in operations and cloud computing as a result of the pandemic. Successful transformation starts with a vision that articulates how to harness computer-based digital technologies to achieve strategic objectives based on the organization’s own digital business model. Privacy and adherence to regulations is key in this sector and as a result, it’s been slow to digitally transform.
Boosting the customer experience
Nearly 70 percent of all respondents say their organizations’ top teams changed during the transformation—most commonly when new leaders familiar with digital technologies joined the management team. The survey results indicate how, exactly, companies should make the technology-supported changes that differentiate successful digital transformations from the rest (Exhibit 2). Every definition of digital transformation is different, depending on the industry and the particular project. But the main components will likely include rethinking business models, changing the underlying technology stack, innovating with customer experience and also potentially even remaking company culture.
McKinsey research also shows that the execution stage—embedding transformation disciplines into business-as-usual structures, processes, and systems—is key to generating value. As business leaders focus more on their productivity and efficiency, the impact of digitalization initiatives like this can be dramatic. In addition to accelerating processing and eliminating the risk of missing documentation, the overall experience becomes simpler, faster, and more convenient. Submitters gain single sign-on access to a mobile app that allows them to capture transactions on the go. At the same time, the finance team can improve its intercompany processes with OCR-enabled bank statement recognition and better transparency into business spending. Business management consultancy Altimeter reported in 2016 that CMOs most often led digital transformation, followed by CIOs and CTOs.
What is Digital Transformation?
Manual processes often slow down productivity and tend to be prone to error. Success is also more likely when organizations scale up their workforce planning and talent development (Exhibit 3). For example, 27 percent of respondents report successful transformations when their companies set cross-functional or enterprise-wide hiring goals based on specific skill needs—nearly twice the share of respondents whose organizations do not. “As organisations accelerate their pursuit of a digital-first strategy, they are channelling these investments into both internal operations and external direct engagement,” says Craig Simpson, senior research manager at IDC.
Digital transformation in retail can automate and optimize logistics networks – customizing and speeding up delivery. And as in every consumer sector, the growing demand for personalized services is also driving digital innovation. A recent Epsilon study saw 80% of shoppers more likely to choose a retailer that offers personalized services – including 24×7 chatbots, personalized product suggestions, predictive recommendations, and fluid omnichannel https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ mobility. Hear from pharmaceutical manufacturing and healthcare solutions company, Kiara Health, and how it has greater efficiency and has future proofed its business thanks to its ERP system. IKEA’s decision to stop creating its well-known print catalog shifted investment to other areas. IKEA’s acquisition of Geomagical Labs will enable customers to create a 3D representation of a room, ‘delete’ the existing furniture and virtually add new pieces.
Three Rules For Customer Experience Transformation In Financial Services
Improving customer experience has become a crucial goal – and thus a crucial part of digital transformation. Hinchcliffe calls seamless customer experience “the most important discriminating factor for how a business will perform.” What no one can deny, however, is the ever-increasing role of business professionals in IT purchasing decisions. Agile management has its origins in software development, but as Harvard Business Review suggests, it has spread far beyond its product development and manufacturing roots.
- That could be why only 38% of enterprise businesses have digital strategies, compared with 55% of startups.
- The real challenge for companies is to choose the right type of technology and also implement it in ways that ensure people will use it properly and securely – and ensure that the new tech integrates seamlessly within their existing tech stack.
- Chief digital officers, in many cases, act as coleaders of the transformation and typically work with digital and AI technologies to create new digital experiences for users.
- Enterprise businesses and established companies can tend to enforce rigid, formal hierarchies, which contribute to less collaboration and a slower pace of change.
- As a result, banks and financial institutions increasingly look to dispute management as an opportunity to strengthen customer relationships.
- It is a sweeping, global set of changes that fundamentally impacts how you do business.
- Our research “Make the Leap, Take the Lead” shows that leading companies in enterprise technology were growing two times faster than most companies, and by doubling down on their tech investments recently, they are now growing five times faster.
That means identifying how to use technologies to deliver new products and services, to improve existing products and services, and to streamline processes. Smaller businesses often have leaner structures and more fluid teams, which can help with collaboration and transparency. But they also have smaller operating budgets, which means they should focus their efforts on a single, specific goal that supports the overall strategy for the business, like improving customer experience or reducing operational costs through cloud services. One of the biggest digital transformation challenges for companies that were not “born digital” is legacy systems and applications — older technologies that don’t support digital initiatives, but can’t easily be replaced. If the leadership group refuses to pay to replace old technologies or fails to garner the necessary executive- and board-level support for investing in a technology overhaul, digital transformation is unlikely to happen.
Digital Transformation for Businesses
To prove the success of digital transformation efforts, leaders need to quantify the return on investment. That’s easier said than done with projects that cross functional and business boundaries, change how a company goes to market, and often fundamentally reshape interactions with customers and employees. The general consensus from experts around the tech industry is that the rapid digital transformation pushed by CIOs and their teams helped change the perception of IT for good. Rather than being seen primarily as a service to other functions, such as sales and finance, technology is now recognised as a critical factor for long-term business success. Most CEOs (72%) continue to prioritize digital investments, according to the 2022 CEO Outlook report from KPMG, in part due to concerns about emerging and disruptive technology, a top three risk to organizational growth. Executives know that if their businesses don’t continually evolve through digital transformation they risk being overtaken by competitors or shut down by startups that are more efficient, more effective, and more engaged with their customers.
