Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Why Businesses Need to Leverage the Power of Digital Transformation?

In a rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations are pulling out all the stops to adapt to evolving customer needs as they are run the risk of being left out by newer, more nimble competitors. The fiercely competitive marketplace makes it imperative for businesses to embrace Digital Transformation (DX) to augment their operational efficiency and profitability.

Digital Transformation has moved way beyond being just a buzzword. DX is no more a matter of choice for organizations and has become a strategic priority to cope with evolving market dynamics. The significance of DX can be underpinned by the International Data Corporation (IDC) report that stated that worldwide spending on Digital Transformation is forecasted to touch $2.3 trillion by 2023, which drives home the point that enterprises are focusing on digital transformation as a long-term investment. 

It is important to understand why Digital Transformation is imperative for organizations. DX if implemented appropriately, can provide businesses an enhanced customer experience, in terms of maintaining real-time communication with customers. Further, owing to its metrics-tracking and data analyzing capabilities, DX enables organizations to leverage data-based insights to rework their strategies and processes for delivering even better results as well as take better and faster decisions.

Digital Transformation also substantially enhances the business agility of businesses and positions them in the highest state of readiness to continuously improve and innovate its processes and operations. Data security is often considered a pain point for businesses, but a committed DX strategy can help businesses address such data security concerns. Digital Transformation can be handy in empowering the workforce and helps businesses drive productivity improvements among its employees. DX also eases collaboration challenges of enterprises (who work closely with various industry stakeholders) by facilitating a transparent workflow that enables them to achieve operational efficiency.

Although enterprises are aware of the importance of Digital Transformation initiatives, its implementation has not been on expected lines. According to a study conducted by Everest Group, 73 percent of organizations failed to deliver any business value from their DX efforts. This is largely owing to lack of strategic planning among businesses, resistance to change, absence of a customer-centric approach, reckless technology adoption, and focusing on agility without understanding it or being adequately prepared for the same.

So then, what do businesses need to come up with to ensure a successful Digital Transformation implementation? Firstly, organizations need to showcase an unflinching commitment towards ensuring a successful DX journey. It is generally observed that organizations achieve a fair amount of success in its phase I of DX implementation but somehow are not able to retain that focus in phase II to lack of adequate push from the top management. At times, enterprises find competing priorities a big roadblock in the smooth DX implementation. Businesses will stand to gain if they accord high priority to their DX initiatives through its entire phase. Further, organizations will be better off if they break the entire Digital Transformation initiative into small projects and goals that can deliver measurable goals aligned with their vision and strategic intent. Organizations need to focus on how their operations need to change to deliver improved experiences to customers as well as employees while focusing on implementing technologies. 

There is no denying the fact that organizations cannot expect to survive without unlocking the power of Digital Transformation. DX has and will continue to remain an integral part of the day-to-day operations of organizations. 


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