4 Reasons your Digital Transformation Hasnt Reached its Full Potential

You’ve undertaken a digital transformation initiative and implemented all the right technologies, but have you unlocked their full potential?

Are your technologies connected and are they integrated across your entire organisation?

As a business owner, you understand the importance of investing in technology and how digital transformation is driving customer experience.

However, simply purchasing new technology solutions doesn’t guarantee success for your organisation.  

With an effective digital transformation strategy in place, that considers the adoption of key technologies, penetration of those technologies and organisational culture, you could experience over twice your revenue growth. However, without a strategy, your revenue could decrease by almost half.

There’s a difference between implementing a particular technology solution and realising the full benefits of that investment across your entire enterprise.

Just say you purchase a new car that comes with a computer displaying the car’s speed on a screen.

That’s useful, but imagine if the computer connected to other parts of the car and gave you access to information about navigation, temperature, petrol or battery quantity and integrated with your mobile phone.

The computer could even store data to give you meaningful insights such as distances travelled on a tank of petrol, or your tyres need to be replaced in two weeks.

That’s realising the full potential of a connected system.

Consider the way most businesses approach technology:

New technologies purchased as individual solutions to individual problems

Let’s take a website, for example, you may have a custom design website that is amazing and looks unique. Now your business has an online presence but how will it meet your business objectives?

Imagine if you connect Google Analytics to your website, it provides insights for your SEO and marketing team to drive intelligent marketing decisions.

Or connect your CRM with your website contact form to capture leads directly to your CRM. It is one less task that your sales team would have to do and it will increase their efficiency.    

The gap between the potential of your technology and how you actually use it is never addressed

In our experience, it is important to educate all employees on how new technology will make their duties easier and more efficient. It is also important to communicate to owners or executives how and why closing the gap between the potential of new technology and how it is used will ensure your tech investments pay dividends.

For example, you might implement Microsoft Teams so employees can chat with each other via instant messaging. But you don’t use it to collaborate on shared work, securely store files, host meetings or connect apps to Microsoft Teams.

Technology implemented haphazardly

New technology won’t solve any of your business problems if it doesn’t connect and share information with your existing systems and if it’s difficult for your employees to learn to use.

Taking this approach to your digital transformation will lead to a lot of money and time wasted and not to mention frustration for yourself and your team. It will limit your business growth and competitiveness because your business will not have the efficiency, scalability and business intelligence to reduce cost and increase growth.

Inability to scale and innovate

Technology will fast become redundant, and your money will be wasted if it can’t scale to the particular needs of your business now and into the future. Without the correct business intelligence data to make informed business decisions, it’s impossible to innovate, create processes, products and ideas that help your business grow, adapt and lead.

Compare the above approach to that of a business with a clearly-defined digital transformation strategy in place:

Ability to adopt technology in a systematic and sequential manner

Adopt technology earlier, reinvest as required, budget for innovation and acquire technology with a more planned-out approach.

Think in terms of systems, not individual technologies

Technology is implemented across your organisation so that it helps the entire organisation interconnect rather than just one area. Carefully consider how new technologies will interact with the people and processes you already have in place then start your digital transformation initiative by building a technology stack specifically for your business.

Regard technology as:

• Human-centric: Technology designed with human needs at the forefront will unlock your employees’ skill, knowledge, flexibility and creativity.
• Barrier-free: Remove the partitions between applications, infrastructure, data, humans and machines.
• Versatile: When you leverage machine-learning, automation and AI, technology will adapt, learn, improve and scale by itself. Mundane manual processes will become a thing of the past.

Ready to implement a digital transformation strategy that’ll place you far ahead of your competitors?

We love to help, have a chat with us today and find out how we can help your business.