By 2025, the spending on digital transformation technologies will reach $2.8 trillion; A figure that demonstrates how businesses are taking transformation efforts seriously. Digitalization future-proofs your company, establishing it as an agile, flexible company, set to exploit opportunities and grow. While each organization’s journey is unique, the main reasons for digital transformation are to improve current processes and remain competitive.
But what happens if you fail?
The success rate for digitalization efforts remains invariably low: only 30% of transformation initiatives meet or surpass their targets, causing sustainable change. Even digitally smart industries such as media, high-tech, and telecom are not spared, with the rate barely exceeding 26%.
Why is this happening? A mix of reasons varying from internal resistance, absence of commitment, unclear goals, fear of failure, and a poor strategy. Here’s how you can overcome these and succeed at digital transformation.
What is digital transformation?
Digital transformation is integrating digital technology across your business, to create new business processes or modify existing ones and radically change how you operate to meet changing business and market requirements. It involves adjusting your organizational culture and cultivating a digital mindset to deliver value to customers.
Digitalization is about disrupting traditional ways of operating and adopting relatively new practices such as custom application development that continually challenge the status quo. It requires reimagining how you do business, communicate, and engage with customers.
Why is digital transformation important?
- Improves customer experience: In digital transformation, businesses leverage technology to create new products and services that add value to customers and personalize the end-user experience. It’s using a customer-centric approach to continually find novel solutions that meet customer needs better through multiple touchpoints.
- Increases efficiency: Using a workflow management tool as part of digital transformation boosts efficiency because it promotes a more collaborative and experimental strategy. It builds new systems that streamline processes and enforce new ways of working that heighten employee innovation and stimulate company growth.
- Fosters business agility: Digital transformation goes beyond implementing new technology into optimizing people and processes. It empowers your company to use technology and information intelligently and rapidly adapt to changing customer expectations, market pressures, and supply chain disruptions.
- Raises productivity and innovation: Digitization eliminates manual and repetitive processes, allowing employees to focus on more meaningful tasks that increase their creativity and productivity. Empowering non-tech professionals with a low code platform, helps them create powerful apps which ease their work and transform your business.
Digital transformation failure rates and possible causes
These statistics underscore the importance of fail proofing your digital transformation initiatives:
- Only 16% of employees admit their organization’s digital efforts have enhanced productivity and are sustainable in the long term.
- Many employees viewed digital transformation implementation as complex, with 76% finding it somewhat or highly challenging.
- 45% of company executives feel their company doesn’t have the right technology to enforce digital transformation.
- Resistance from employees is the number one reason 70% of digital transformations fail.
5 ways to ensure your digital transformation efforts succeed
1. Have clear digital goals
Before attempting digital transformation, specify the exact business goals you want to achieve and communicate this to employees. Don’t just go digital because your competitors are doing it. Unclear digitalization goals prevent you from developing an accurate, effective digital strategy that connects to your business. On the flip side, clear digital goals help you draw a roadmap with end goals to track the transformation process. In your goals, consider cultural transformation, interoperability, and business scalability.
2. Foster a culture of transformation
Your company’s culture is among the major predictors of digital transformation success. The wrong organizational culture can cause your digital initiatives to fail, underperform, or regress. The right culture helps your team adopt and nurture your transformation efforts. But you cannot transform the way your organization operates without a change of attitude. To promote a transformational culture, help co-workers let go of limiting beliefs, break down inter-department barriers, and highlight why digitization is necessary.
3. Find the right talent
If your team doesn’t have digital transformation skills and experience, your organization is likely to make mistakes such as drafting an unclear strategy, setting incorrect goals, and misusing resources. You may not deliver on targets, which can make your entire digitalization strategy fail. While training your existing staff empowers them and bridges skill gaps, it’s not always possible to achieve success with them, so consider hiring external experts. These experts will prioritize transformation initiatives with the greatest impact, avoid delays and failures.
4. Focus on customers
Digitalization is only worth the effort if it’s customer-centric. Understanding your customers’ needs and transforming their experience can propel your business to new heights. Customers keep your business alive, so addressing their pain points is a must. If your digital transformation efforts affect customers negatively, your competitors may benefit from your market share. Craft a digital transformation strategy focused on a better, more competitive customer experience, and you’ll retain old customers as you attract new ones.
5. Involve your employees
It’s only natural for employees to resist change, but addressing this increases your chances of success. Communicating consistently and involving teams throughout builds transparency and trust toward digitalization, helping them feel part of the process. It resolves any concerns they have, reduces the fear of the unknown, and helps them embrace change. Explain how your company expects to reach the digitalization goal, foster collaboration, and encourage employees to view transformation as an opportunity for professional growth.
Conclusion
It’s no longer a matter of whether or not to transform, but more about when and how. To continually improve and adapt in an ever-changing environment, your business should evolve as technology does. Begin your digital transformation with an aspirational goal and a clear integrated strategy. Rethink your current approach and experiment with new tech, but be flexible to minimize your chances of failure. Kissflow helps you establish clear metrics and use data to measure progress, address roadblocks quickly, and track your journey. You can only stay ahead of the curve if your transformation efforts succeed.
