It is no longer a hidden fact that the digital world has become so hyper competitive since the past decade that businesses are struggling to thrive and flourish. The dynamically changing consumer base, introduction of next-gen technologies, and increasing demand for omnichannel experience have created problems for most businesses and enterprises, especially the ones with legacy operations and platforms. Surviving in the market with outdated and obsolete processes and technologies is indeed perilous.
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So, businesses have no choice other than to rely on digital transformation to foster innovation and intuitiveness, generate better leads, increase conversion ratio, and enhance omni channel user experience. Considering this, we have shed light on what digital transformation is, the major types of digital transformation, processes and strategies, and several other relevant facts. These will help businesses to understand the concept in-depth and take prompt decision regarding their digital transformation journey.
What is Digital Transformation?
To put in simple words, digital transformation is a journey that involves using technologies and implementing strategies to change the existing processes and software applications, orchestrate new workflows, and streamline the overall business functionalities. It allows businesses to improve productivity, increase output and performance, reduce risks, eliminate silos, and enhance security at all levels.
Following are a few areas that are often targeted for improvement through digital transformation.
- Customer experience: Businesses can improve the overall customer experience across all channels through digital transformation. For instance, data analysis can help businesses monitor customer behavioral trends and accordingly scale the services and products to meet the demands.
- Culture and leadership: With digital transformation, it is possible for enterprises to bring positive changes in the work culture and leadership programs. From establishing employee feedback channels to modifying leadership strategies, there are numerous ways through which digital transformation can improve the business’s relations with its employees.
- Technology adoption: One of the key areas where digital transformation is essential is technology. Adopting new technologies, migrating from obsolete to trending technologies, and integrating new concepts with existing processes are a few examples through which technological transformation is possible in the digital world.
What are the major types of digital transformation?
In this below section, we have talked about the five major types of digital transformation that are suitable for businesses of all kinds.
Business process transformation
As the name suggests, this form of digital transformation targets the existing business processes and allows professionals to introduce changes that can help reduce operational costs, improve brand value and image, enhance the customer experience, improve service and product quality, and even reduce the time to market. The processes that can be targeted through business process transformation mainly concern the day-to-day business operations and employee interactions at the internal infrastructure. From providing access to new technologies to maximizing the monetary investments in data research and marketing departments, there are several ways business process transformation can be acknowledged.
Business model transformation
Every business works on a specific model that defines the ways services or products are offered to the end customers. For instance, Netflix operates on a SaaS-based business model where it offers services to the end users as per the subscriptions. Transforming the business model means exploring the new waters and understanding if the business can perform well in areas that aren’t currently integrated in the model. With this, it becomes easier to foster innovation and overcome the bottleneck regions of the market while targeting a new consumer base with ease.
Domain transformation
Domain transformation concerns changing the entire market area where the business is currently operating. For instance, Amazon transformed its domain from being the largest online retailer to a reputable cloud service provider by introducing Amazon Web Services. Domain transformation allows businesses to overcome the limitations set by the existing market trends and conditions while ensuring the potentials of the new domain can be unraveled to the fullest. Adopting technologies like wearables, IoT and 5G, and artificial intelligence is one of the promising ways to facilitate and kickstart the domain transformation journey.
Cultural transformation
The next type of digital transformation businesses can invest in is cultural transformation. From changing the leadership principles to introducing new workplace cultural norms, there are numerous ways in which the transformational roadmap can be formulated. For instance, when a business wants to explore a new technology, it needs to educate the employees about the same. This is a way of cultural transformation. Now, it is one of the most difficult transformational approaches since not everyone shares the same opinion about the changes to be implemented. Besides, to become successful in cultural transformation, it is crucial that your business and the employees adopt new skills, upgrade the existing skillset, and always be eager to learn and adapt.
Cloud transformation
Lastly, the latest form of digital transformation that can be witnessed in the market is cloud transformation. As the name suggests, it allows a business to shift to the cloud environment or adopt a new cloud-based business model to overcome the boundaries of traditional operations. For instance, a company migrating a certain set of applications from the onsite server to the cloud network or a business offering XaaS-based services to the customers can embark on a cloud transformation journey with ease. It leverages the businesses with numerous benefits, including organizational flexibility and scalability, data efficiency, reduced capital and operational expenses, and many more.
How businesses can leverage digital transformation for overall growth and improvement?
- With digital transformation, it is possible for businesses to improve the quality of services and products by several notches, ensuring the customer demands can be met on time.
- User experiences can be easily enhanced with the successful implementation of digital transformation roadmap. From introducing omnichannel experience to enhancing user journeys with the business, digital transformation enables the companies to make their offerings customer-centric.
- Digital transformation also brings a substantial increase in the overall revenues while reducing the operational costs, cutting down the maintenance costs of outdated systems, and lowering the customer acquisition costs.
- Appropriate management of the resources and delegating the responsibilities become easier with digital transformation for businesses of all sizes and types.
What are the best practices and technologies for digital transformation?
Numerous technologies and practices can be adopted at the present day to kickstart digital transformation. Below we have mentioned a few to start with.
- Cloud computing
- Machine learning
- Artificial intelligence
- Augmented reality
- Virtual reality
- Metaverse
- Mobile platforms
- Edge computing
- Automation
- Blockchain
- Internet of Things
What strategies businesses should adopt for digital transformation?
It is not possible to implement digital transformation without a proper strategy or roadmap. Going all out without a clear vision can lead the business towards its doom. That’s why we have listed a few strategies that can empower the enterprise for a successful digital transformation journey.
Understanding the types of transformation
As already discussed above, there are five major types of digital transformation, each having a specific target area. Unless you have a clear idea about these classifications, you won’t be able to know the prerequisites to be fulfilled to kickstart the transformation campaign or mitigate the failure risks right on time. Apart from this, not knowing the types and its roadmaps in detail will create more hurdles during the strategy-formulation phase, causing you to go back and forth without any fruitful result.
Evaluating the existing digital framework
Knowing about the existing digital transformation framework will help you pinpoint the bottleneck regions your business has encountered till date. It can be in the IT operations, monitoring tools, management workflows, or anything else. Unless you have a clear picture of the existing scenario, you won’t be able to draw fruitful strategies for the upcoming digital transformation phase. Furthermore, you might end up working on an unnecessary domain that doesn’t require too much transformation given the current status and efficiency of your business.
Curating and analyzing data
One of the proven strategies for a successful digital transformation journey is data curation and analysis. Unearthing the hidden digital transformation trends and facts using various types of datasets will help you understand the current pain points of the business, get a clear picture of the market conditions, and decide if the decided roadmap will be fruitful or not. Besides, analyzing customer data will help you understand the targeted consumer base and meet their expectations by making proper modifications to the digital transformation routine.
Choosing proper technologies
No digital transformation journey will ever be complete without adopting the latest technological drivers. Therefore, you need to work on understanding the tech concepts that can help you overcome the IT operational hiccups your business is facing as of now. For instance, you may resolve the incompetence of the monitoring tools with the AIOps platform. Similarly, implementing microservices or moving to the cloud network might help you resolve the redundancies and discrepancies in the existing legacy enterprise applications.
Conclusion
Explore the various types of digital transformation businesses can choose to enhance the overall customer experience, foster innovation, facilitate technology adoption, and improve overall productivity and deliverability. Additionally, we have also shed light on the current technologies and drivers of digital transformation that will help you orchestrate a proper roadmap for the changes and yield fruitful results in the upcoming years. So, you can connect with our experts at Gowide to learn more about obsolete processes, services, and products and understand the appropriate roadmaps to implement digital transformation. We will assess your business requirements and choose the best digital transformation model that will help you eliminate the siloes, overcome the current challenges your business is facing in the digital market, and enhance the omnichannel user experience by several notches.
