Thought Leaders

What is Digital Transformation And Why Does It Matter?

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Digital Transformation is integrating digital technologies in all areas of business. It also changes the mentality of traditional delivering the values. It improvises the operating and delivering model and the values that an organization deliver to its customer.

Beyond this, it is also a cultural change, which requires organizations to challenge their traditional methods continually.

Why Digital Transformation Matter?

An Organization may take on digital transformation for several reasons, but the most likely cause is the survival issue. Businesses don’t transform by choice because it is expensive and risky. Business went through a transformation when they failed to evolve. For more help, you could pop over to these guys.

How does the Digital Transformation Framework Look?

Although digital transformation will vary based on the organization-specific challenges and demands, there are few common aspects of digital transformation which create a common theme or framework that all technology leaders and business should consider when they embark on digital transformation. Those are:

  • Customer Experience
  • Operational Agility
  • Culture and Leadership
  • Workforce enablement
  • Digital Technology Integration

While each of these elements has its different steps, but CIO’s can look for the critical shared themes when developing their digital transformation strategy.

***Here is an excellent video document that is being created by Cognizant, and it talks about a detailed framework for Digital Transformation. You may find it useful. The Initial material was in PDF format, but for better visibility of the document and for the convenience to upload it in this article, I have converted it to MP4 and uploaded the same in my YouTube and sharing the link here.***

How culture Play a significant role in Digital Transformation?

Recently IT’s role has fundamentally shifted, and CEOs want their CIO’s to help generate revenue for the organizations. Earlier the top priority for CIO’s was to improve the business process, but now with digital transformation comes into the picture, the CIO’s top operational priority is to develop innovative new products.

SO rather than focusing on cost savings, IT has become the primary diver of business innovation. This shift requires everyone to rethink their roles and the impact of IT in their day – to – day experience.

However, IT will play an essential role in driving digital transformation strategy, but the work of implementing and adapting to the massive changes which go along with digital transformation fall to everyone. So Digital Transformation is a people issue.

What drives Digital Transformation?

An essential element of digital transformation is, of course, technology, but it is more about shedding outdated processes and legacy technology. The legacy technology and obsolete process hinder CIO’s ability to embark on a digital transformation strategy successfully.

CIO’s often spend 72% of average time and budget on existing IT concerns while 28% goes to new projects or innovation. If a business wants to evolve with the rapid pace of the digital changes today, then they must focus on increasing the efficiency with technology wherever possible.

It means adopting agile principles across business and automation of technologies will help IT organizations to gain speed and momentum and to will help them to reduce the technical debts.

What is trending in digital transformation in 2020?

2020 will see a rapid scaling of Digital Initiatives across industries. There are particular areas where the CIOs and organizations have prepped their organizations for change but have not made the full leap of implementation in transforming their culture to embrace the change fully.

Here are some of the key digital transformation trends that every organization, CIOs, business, and IT leaders should be aware of in 2020:

  • The rapid adoption of digital operating models and integration of the same with cross-functional teams.
  • A shakeout as those that have invested in big data governance and analytics leapfrog their competitors.
  • Increase the usability of AI and machine learning.
  • Continue the mergers and acquisitions activity in the IT outsourcing industry.
  • Consultancies are forming new digital partnerships.
  • Organizations are expanding public cloud adoption.
  • New digital transformation success metrics.
  • Organizations are giving more attention to the long-term value of digital initiatives.

How can Digital Transformation measure ROI?

To prove the digital transformation effort and values, leaders need to analyze and quantify the return on investment. It is easy to say but very challenging in implementing this with Projects that cross-functional and business boundaries, change how a company goes to market and often fundamentally reshape interactions with customers and employees.

A Project such as revamping applications may have a short-term payoff, but other projects are chasing longer-term business values.

Digital transformation efforts are ongoing and evolving. It can render traditional business values, calculations, and financial governance approaches less effective. At the same time, quantifying success is crucial to continue investment.

Implementing the technology is not enough, but the technology has to be tied explicitly to monitoring key performance indicators on customer insights and business process effectiveness.

When we are determining how well the digital transformation investment is performing, then it’s better to take a portfolio view rather than a project view. It’s similarly the way a mutual fund manager or a venture capital firm would look at overall performance to determine how well things are going.

Digital transformation leaders must take a holistic view of digital change efforts.

It is vital because the underperformance of a project doesn’t reflect negatively on the overarching efforts of IT. It will also help in building a tolerance limit for the necessary risks that must be undertaken to achieve real digital transformation goals.

There are some of the digital transformation metrics, which every organization, CIOs, business, and technology leaders should consider.

  • Set initial Metrics in advance
  • develop micro-metrics for agile experiments – The goal should be to learn and adjust.
  • Incorporate business outcome: Check strategic impacts like revenue growth, lifetime customer value, and time to market. Check operational impacts like productivity improvement, Scale, and operational efficiencies. Finally, check the cost impact.

How to get started on Digital Transformation?

One of the most common misconceptions all the CIOs have about digital transformation is that all of their competitors are much ahead of the game than they are. That’s because there is much admiration of the fastest transformer, but a little critique of how hard transformation is or how long it may take for a typical global company.

Every business formulates its digital transformation strategy, but it is smart to be learned from the CIO’s and IT leaders who have already begun their journey in Digital Transformation.

Benefits of Digital Transformation:

  • Companies that implement a digital transformation strategy have been shown to increase performance and revenues.
  • As a project manager, digital transformation helps streamline communication, improve collaboration, and shift your focus from project process and status to strategy and outcomes.
  • Digital transformation allows team members to spend more time working in their creative wheelhouses, resulting in happier, more fulfilled, more productive employees.

How digital transformation is changing the traditional ways of Project Management.

  • More efficient and strategic communication among teams and companies:One of the most significant areas in which modern digital technology is redefining project management cross-team communication. As traditional tools such as emails are cumbersome when it comes to communication and collaboration.

    The importance or the intent of the communication lost over endless email chains and constant email overload tanks productivity. Whereas the collaborative work management software allows the team members and co-workers to engage, connect, and interact in real-time across departments and geographical locations. These tools cut down email clutter significantly.

    Not only this, but it also saves loads of time in the process. These tools will not increase the efficiency of intra-work communication. It will also improve effectiveness, as well. When team members are freed from filtering through thousands of emails a day to keep up with project status, then they can spend more time talking about project strategy, which is precisely where a team should focus.

  • More collaboration within teams and ownership from team members:Along with facilitating more efficient, Strategy-Focused communication, modern work management technologies are making it easier for teams to collaborate.

    With the right platform in place, all the executives, project managers, and team members can add comments, assign tasks, organize dashboards, proof and approve assets, and handle everything else related to the project in all in one convenient solution.

  • More focus on results rather than process:As Digital Transformation automates the workflows and coordinates traditional project management tasks like scheduling, So PMs will get more time to focus on strategy optimization, benefits realization, and Project Delivery.

    According to PMI prediction, “As digital transformation continues to touch companies across every industry and verticals, thus it will portray all the project managers as strategic leaders in their organizations.”

    With all the digital tools and automated processes, project managers are homing in on the best way to align each project with their business strategies and goals and delivering more successful outcomes in the process.

  • More analytics for improved PM processes, outcomes, and ROI:Digital transformation is providing PMs the analytical techniques to make data-driven decisions, break down patterns and trends, and ultimately enhance project outcomes and success rates.

    This assists executives and managers in making better-informed decisions faster and easier than before. Apart from these robust analytic reports help managers keep projects on track and tracking budget spent with real-time cost and labour analysis.

    These tools provide all the organization leaders and executives a precise insight into business impact and ROI on every project and help them to plan their future initiatives and in making critical decisions.

***Below given is an excellent video prepared by the Project Management Institute, which talks about Digital Transformation and how Digital Transformation is disrupting Project Management and Leaders. ***

References:

Abhishek Mishra
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