If you read our 5 Digital Transformation Success Factors article, you already know that accepting digital transformation as a holistic change is a first step toward success. Even if the need stems from one department, recognizing the ramifications outside of departmental bubbles is key. By taking on digital transformation, you need to be comfortable with and prepared for a total culture shift. Now that you know what success factors contribute to the best digital transformation implementations, it’s time to uncover how to achieve those successes for your own organization.

Important steps to prepare for a successful digital transformation project:

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Identify Pain Points

Digital transformation does not mean buying new tech and hoping for the best. Strategic planning is required to ensure your digital transformation solution has successful, wide-reaching impact that helps departments work together. To achieve success, you must consider what those impacts may be and how further opportunities can enhance your business processes. This takes careful consideration and strategic planning.

If you are at the point of undertaking a digital transformation, you probably already know your pain points and needs. But if you have ever lost your glasses only to find them on your face, you know it can be easy to miss things that are right in front of you. A digital transformation consultant can help you gain an objective understanding of your business landscape and determine best how to address your needs. But a helpful first step is to begin listening your teams, customers, and competitor’s clients to prepare your discovery. Here are some suggestions:

• Listen to your teams: Your team is what makes your business run, so knowing what is or is not allowing them to perform at their peak is critical to your overall success. What are the challenges your team encounters most frequently? What issues are having the most detrimental impact? Are certain processes particularly problematic? Are certain tools constantly failing?
• Listen to your customers: No business can stay alive without customers, so ensuring their needs are not just met but exceeded is vital. Are your prospects able to easily engage with your products or services? Are you able to quickly react to issues and requests? Are you retaining existing customers? How do you reach them? If via a website or app, are they user friendly? Do prospective customers or existing clients have reason to question how you are collecting or storing their sensitive, personal information? Are you in compliance? How seamless are your transactions? Can you streamline processes such as onboarding or payments?
• Listen to your competitor’s customers: You undoubtedly have a pulse on what’s happening with your competitors, but this sleuthing can also help you improve and plan your digital transformation. Read their customer reviews and identify common praise and complaints. What are they able to deliver that you don’t? What are they unable to deliver that you could do better? Research your competitors, learn from their mistakes, and see how you can solve their pain points to fix your own.

Take Stock of Your Team—and Your Clients

User adoption is critical to digital transformation success, so evaluating the skillset of your team is an essential step towards that goal. Now that you have listened to the needs of your people, it’s time to step back and evaluate their capabilities. Think about the skills of your team members; are they capable of implementing the changes you need, or will you need to bring in experts? How much training will each department require? How much training will your end users need? Will some customers require accommodation, such as more in-depth training or even retention of traditional processes, to offset steep learning curves? While you won’t have solutions to these questions yet, it’s important to keep them top-of-mind as you prepare for digital transformation. Which is why you must…

Plan Your Communication and Curriculum

Springing new tech on teams may be exciting, but not everyone will have Christmas morning elation. Be prepared for some team members to need more education than others and make accommodations for trainings. Consider training modalities like webinars or knowledge base articles to help support user adoption. The same goes for clients who are accustomed to your platforms.

Additionally, some members may find it difficult to transition away from old habits, which is why early communication is key to prepare employees (or customers) for change. Set realistic goals for transitioning to new working environments and methods, and ensure you factor those deadlines into your project timeline. And be open to feedback. Understanding what is and is not working will help you make enhancements or adjustments that will improve efficiency in the long run. A digital transformation consultant should have training modules baked into their strategy. They will help you navigate how to introduce new working methods to team members, train teams on new tech, and provide resource documentation to help guide the process.

“One of the big roles of leaders [during a digital transformation] is to create a safe, supporting environment where people are able to learn.”

Kristine Dery, Research Scientist at MIT Center for Information Systems Research
How to Nurture a Digital Workforce

Audit your tech

Take stock of the technology that you use. You may be surprised to find that services you already use can be integrated for a more robust solution or include tools that serve your unmet needs. What’s more, you may find tech that you are paying for but not utilizing, or duplicates of the same tools across multiple departments. A good digital transformation consultant will take a deep dive into your IT infrastructure ahead of a digital transformation engagement, but having a basic starting point is a good practice, even if you have an idea of the services or platforms you want to use to modernize your operations.

Consider Your Timeline and Budget

Next, consider your timelines. How urgent is your need? How quickly can your teams realistically adapt to change? Additionally, how massive is the change you are undertaking? Don’t bank on overnight results that are unachievable. Consider working in phases to keep progress at a steady pace without being overwhelming.

Also consider how much you want to invest and what makes sense for your organization. What already exists in your tech stack? What features do you really need? Do you have the right, or enough, people in place to support your initiatives? This can include leveraging ongoing support for managed services versus hiring a whole team.

How a digital transformation consultant can help you prepare for digital transformation:

Partnering with a digital transformation consultant can help you identify your pain points, devise an effective roadmap, and put together a comprehensive action plan that fits within your budget. Coretelligent’s digital transformation solutions, CoreDTS, are crafted to match the business goals of clients, pinpoint any challenges they are facing, and construct technology-driven solutions customized to meet their needs. Using agile methodology, our build-and-operate approach keeps projects running smoothly while managing costs and maintaining clear expectations for tasks. From development to deployment, to maintenance and enhancements, our clients are fully supported throughout their journey. To learn more about how we can help you on your digital transformation journey, contact one of our experts today.

Digital transformation is intrinsically linked to technology, but the most vital digital transformation success factors are less about tech and more about planning, strategy, and support. Here we explore our five must-haves for a successful digital transformation and how you can achieve them in your organization.

Our top 5 digital transformation success factors are:

1. Be proactive
2. Avoid Band-Aid solutions
3. Focus on the need, not the tools
4. Prioritize user adoption
5. Don’t go it alone

1. Be proactive

“The key to cutting through the confusion is to see that digital transformation is not a single thing, but a multi-faceted journey with differing goals depending on your industry and digital maturity.” – Harvard Business Review

Digital transformation is much more than implementing technology. It’s a fundamental, holistic change to the way businesses run. Whether you have identified areas of improvement or wish to undertake digital transformation as part of organizational growth, you must consider your current and long-term goals. This is likely a no-brainer. But you also must take it a step further: you must look at the total impact and buy-in for digital transformation across your entire organization. This begins with a deep understanding of your existing infrastructure, architecture, processes, and teams. (In the case of mergers and acquisitions, this includes evaluating the landscape of all organizations to ensure unified integration.) Next, stakeholders and product owners must be in alignment regarding the viability of service implementation. This includes setting practical timelines and budgets with added consideration to how change requests may influence each. Also critical is establishing realistic expectations for existing teams, including if IT teams can support new infrastructure or if support solutions like MSP services may be required.

Successful digital transformation is never impulsive or performed in a departmental vacuum, but it can be challenging to know how to take the first step towards a clear and cohesive strategy. A practical starting point begins with creating an IT Plan and road map. Download our IT Planning e-book to get started.

Related Content →  What is digital transformation? Watch the video to learn more.

2. Avoid Band-Aid solutions

Being proactive is ideal, but sometimes things need to break to galvanize us into action. And seeking quick fixes, depending on the severity of the issue, can be tempting. But patching a leak will only delay the flood. What’s worse? Small ad hoc fixes can exacerbate the issue by adding even more layers of complexity to dig through, often leading to elevated costs and delays. Resist being led astray by reactive urgency. It is important to evaluate the root cause of issues to prevent recurrence and maintain long-term success.

Working with digital transformation solution experts can help you investigate pain points and identify areas of improvement. At Coretelligent, we help clients develop the strategy required to keep digital transformation projects on track and in line with business objectives. We also help clients with ongoing maintenance and support to ensure systems stay secure and running at peak performance.

3. Focus on the need, not the tools

It is human nature to be drawn to the new shiny thing. But just because a new solution, technology, or tool seems ubiquitous doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for you.

It’s important to consider your end goals and ability to implement before making costly investments in technology that may not deliver. Consider these questions: Does the technology really serve all your needs? Does it pair well with your existing technology stack? Does your existing platform possess the same yet untapped capabilities desired? Do you have a team with the expertise and bandwidth to implement and support new initiatives?

We recently worked with a professional services client that wanted to gain insights and visualizations into disparate data but didn’t have the expertise to implement the tool they purchased for the job. Coretelligent helped the client gain insights by using their preferred tool and leveraging capabilities within their existing platform.

4. Prioritize user adoption

Another key digital transformation success factor is user adoption. This is of equal importance for both backend users and customers alike for digital transformation to succeed.

Employees

Enthusiastic user adoption is a critical component of successful digital transformation, and it starts with your employees. It can be challenging for teams to transition to new working methods, especially if they have grown accustomed to specific technologies and are comfortable with the habits they have structured around them. Introducing digitalization and automation may also create anxiety regarding job retention or skill capability. To help ease this culture shock, it is vital to keep teams informed and educated through the digital transformation journey. This includes providing training and being open to feedback, which can aid in identifying bugs and opportunities for enhancements. Ultimately, how well your teams adapt and adopt will translate directly to the effectiveness and efficiency of your digital transformation initiative.

Customers

You must also consider the impact on your customers, particularly if digital transformation will modify product adoption. As an example, a utility client wanted to enhance user onboarding but did not have the digital infrastructure to support their initiatives. They identified a need for a more robust, self-service website and a paperless method for new user registration. However, many of their existing customers were elderly, still preferring to manage accounts by mail and paper check. While it was important for the utility to create a web interface that modernized their customer journey, they needed to be sensitive to existing customers who would not or could not adopt digital practices. Ensuring all customer journeys remained intact was critical to the digital transformation, even if it meant retaining some traditional methods. Keeping all parties informed about changes and educating them on how to use new features allowed both new and existing customers to feel supported and more likely to remain loyal to the brand.

5. Don’t go it alone

At the end of the day, the root of all digital transformation success comes down to one key factor: support. This includes ensuring you have firm commitment to your digital transformation initiative from within your organization—and from digital transformation experts.

Even the best internal IT teams may fail at digital transformation because it is simply not what they do. Adding on an entire shift in operating procedure can be overwhelming to existing teams. Digital transformation experts help organizations objectively assess needs and develop a plan that modernizes, streamlines, and enhances existing practices with architecture and technology complementary to existing infrastructure.

Related Content → Read how Coretelligent’s CoreDTS team helped a client realize their digital transformation goals → Leveraging Digital Transformation: A Multiphase Case Study.

Working with a digital transformation services provider like Coretelligent goes beyond technical implementation. A major component includes advising clients throughout the digital transformation journey for continued support of their organization. By maintaining open communication with stakeholders and product owners, the collaboration allows clients to receive a total picture of their business’s innerworkings, guarantees buy-in, and provides more opportunities for improvement and finetuning along the way. Plus, digital transformation experts will provide training and support to ensure your teams are equipped to maximize the potential of your solution.