Strategies for Successful Digital Transformation Integration
The importance of digital transformation strategy and its effects on small businesses.
FREMONT, CA: As digital technologies dramatically reshape several industries, many companies are pursuing large-scale strategies like digital transformation framework and digital operating model in efforts to leverage these trends or to keep up with competitors. Yet success in these transformations is proving to be elusive. While earlier research has found that fewer than one-third of organisational transformations succeed at improving a company’s performance and sustaining those gains, the latest results find that the success rate of digital transformations is even higher.
The keys to success
Change occurs at all levels during a digital transformation, especially with regards to talent and capabilities. All respondents say their organisations’ top teams changed during the transformation—most commonly when new leaders familiar with digital technologies joined the management team.
Indeed, adding such a leader is one of the keys to transformation success. So is the engagement of transformation-specific roles—namely, leaders of individual initiatives and leaders of the program-management or transformation office who are dedicated full time to the change effort. Another key to success is leadership commitment. When professionals in key roles (both the senior leaders of the organisation and those in transformation-specific roles) are more involved in a digital transformation than they were in past change efforts, a transformation’s success is more likely.
Empowering people to function in new ways
Digital transformations require cultural and behavioural changes such as calculated risk taking, increased collaboration, and customer centricity. There are two primary ways in which companies with successful transformations are empowering employees to embrace these changes:
• To reinforce new behaviours and ways of working through formal mechanisms, long proved as an action that supports organisational change. Another way to transform success is establishing practices related to functioning in new ways.
• To empower workers is ensuring that people in key roles play parts in reinforcing change.
Giving day-to-day tools a digital upgrade
• The key to digital transformation is adopting digital tools to make information more accessible across the organisation, which more than doubles the likelihood of a successful transformation.
• Implementing digital self-serve technologies for employees, business partners, or both groups to use; transformation success is twice as likely when organisations do so.
• Focused on technology in company operations, is organisations modifying their standard operating procedures to include new technologies.
• Beyond these factors, an increase in data-based decision making and in the visible use of interactive tools can also more than double the likelihood of a transformation’s success.
Skills to Look for When Building Your Team
It takes people with a mix of skills to work in a digitally transformative environment. Companies should be looking for people who have:
• Digital skills
• Social and emotional skills
• Cognitive skills
• Adaptability skills
• Job-specific skills
Adjusting the culture
Digital transformation should be a constant process. It has been observed that even in 2022, companies have had challenges with employees being open to adopting new technologies and ways to get work done. This lack of an adaptability culture slows down the whole transition journey. Business management should create a culture that embraces the new digital changes.
One factor of consideration is the learning ability of the workers. The culture should motivate the workers to be continuous learners and promoters of the newly adopted technologies. It's also important for employers to reassure the workers about the importance of the transformation to the business.
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