Digital Transformation: Critical Success Factors
Digital transformation is key not only in-terms of short-term growth and market share, but also to ensure their long-term survival and relevance. Digital platforms and ecosystems can drive efficiencies, and through new and unexpected collaborations, create new value for businesses and for customers. Digital maturity across industries have been classified into personas such as: beginners, conservatives, fashionistas & digital masters with digital and leadership capability driving their business transformation.
The digital age has brought about a new way of thinking on process and operations. Smart devices with digital capabilities are seamlessly offering direct benefits to industries around productivity, efficiency, innovation and decision making.
Today’s millennial enterprise CEO priorities are innovation, speed to market, public trust and human capital which leads to initiatives around digital and data driven business. The CIO priorities are to manage both innovation and operations. While on one hand it is to increase transformation, efficiency, security, on the other hand it is to cut costs & time for new service, maintain, simplify IT models & infra and improve business process.
The business outcomes of a digital transformation program decides its critical success factor or value proposition. These could be around customer experience transformation or enterprise user efficiency. People, process and technology are critical factors for success of any transformation program.
It is imperative that a digital transformation is applied to the end to end process and not in a piecemeal manner. An extremely jazzy and digital customer acquisition front end with a manual / semi manual process at the back office or vice-versa will never lead to the desired business outcomes. So a complete digital process automation leads to innovation, efficiency and trust and that becomes one of the critical success factor for the transformation program.
Change management is another critical success factor for a digital transformation. People / resources directly or indirectly involved in such a transformation determine the fate of any such initiative. Concerns around perceived loss of control of a manual / semi-automated process, push back on any change, adaption of any innovation should be managed by a structured change management process comprising of clear communication, management direction, creating collaborative environment to address organisational cultural challenges.
Technology plays a key role in the success of an adaptable digital transformation. However instead of technical knowhow or features of a software or hardware, it the ease of implementation, design thinking, smooth transition and program management with a finesse that stands out and results in an acceptable digital transformation which gets applauded both externally and internally.
So a CDO / CTO / CIO whoever is leading the program, needs to keep a few of the finer things in mind and to plan while going about a digital transformation program.
