When most people think of digital transformation, they think of it as a destination they want to reach. The reality is that digital transformation is a journey, not a destination. Even though digital transformation was all the rage even before the pandemic but COVID-19 has accelerated its adoption.
Lack of expertise, experience, clear goal and strategy all can contribute towards digital transformation failure. With this pandemic already disrupting traditional business models and ecosystems, you don’t have any option but to embrace digital transformation.
According to Seth Robinson, senior director of technology analysis at CompTIA said, “Go-to-market strategies, customer interactions, and workforce enablement are all examples of activities that are being transformed by technology and companies must embrace new mindsets around tech adoption and investment in order to remain competitive.”
In this article, you will learn about seven indicators that you are making progress with digital transformation.
7 Indicators That Shows Your Digital Transformation Progress
Do you want to measure your progress towards digital transformation? If yes, then here are seven indicators you should keep an eye on.
1. Repeatable Processes
In most cases, organizations pursuing digital transformation ask their IT departments to create a new approach to managing digital projects and develop tools that can serve them well in the future. When you translate it into high-level goals, it will come down to identifying the distance between where you are and where you want to go.
Simply put, you will have to define key performance indicators that help you measure progress towards your end goal. Develop cross-functional teams and create processes to support those teams.
This will help you handle enterprise change management more efficiently and develop advanced infrastructure. All this will help you with running faster iterations and scaling your business to new heights. Your success will eventually depend on how repeatable your processes are. The easier it is to perform them repeatedly, the higher your chances to succeed.
2. Lower Time To Market
In today’s highly competitive business world, you need to introduce constantly bring new products to the market in order to stay relevant. Your competitors might be fighting for market share and if you want your share of the pie, you need to bring innovative products to the market.
According to Mark Sami, Director of Technology at business and technology consultancy West Monroe, “A great metric to track when measuring your digital transformation journey is the frequency at which you introduce new changes to your business, client or customer.”
He further adds, “This may seem oversimplified and obvious, but it is a great sign of collaboration with business and technology teams. This can be done by solving strategic problems via rapidly deploying, validating, and iterating ideas in the wild – which is at the root of successful digital transformation.”
3. Leaner Processes
When you digitally transform your company, you will have to throw existing processes out of the window and develop new business processes. The new business process you develop must be lean and efficient so it can be executed easily.
Complex business processes with too many sophisticated steps can slow your business ability to bring new products and decreases your efficiency. It will also negatively impact your business productivity and revenue. Make sure your processes consume as little resources and time as possible and help you achieve your business objectives.
4. Happy Customers and Satisfied Employees
Some of the key metrics used to evaluate employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction are increased employee engagement, customer growth and higher employee satisfaction scores. If all these metrics show a positive trend, it sends a clear message that your digital transformation journey is moving in the right direction.
The core focus of your digital transformation efforts should be to make your key stakeholders happy. If your employees are happy, they will give their best shot at work. Additionally, if your customers are satisfied, they will keep coming back to make recurring purchases. So, you should divert all your energies towards making them happy.
5. Streamlined IT
Another direct consequence of successful digital transformation is that it will streamline your IT. It will help your IT team to execute IT projects more efficiently, develop and follow program timelines and minimize costly rework. More importantly, it will help you keep cybersecurity threats at bay by offering DDoS protection.
Due to this, you will notice a significant reduction in the total cost of technology ownership. Moreover, it will free your IT team from mundane tasks by automating them so they can focus on more value-driven activities. This prevents them from employee burnout and minimizes employee turnover. This can be crucial especially when you take the talent shortfall prevalent in the IT industry into consideration.
6. Better Visibility Into Operations
The real fruit of digital transformation efforts will start to become evident when you start to gain visibility into your business operations. If you have full control and complete visibility across your organization then, this is a clear sign that your digital transformation efforts are moving in the right direction.
One of the direct consequences of this enterprise-wide visibility would be higher data availability. This will make it easy for you to extract useful insights from those data sets and make the right decisions based on that data. With actionable insights, you can increase the effectiveness of your strategy and boost operational efficiency as well.
7. Shared Ownership
One of the main reasons why most businesses digital transformation efforts fail is because they make their IT department solely responsible for it. The disconnect between IT and the business team makes things even worse. Due to this most IT teams fails to respond to business needs in a timely manner because they are unaware of where the business is heading in the future.
IT teams are not even involved in creating a business strategy so they don’t know about the steps business will take to achieve their goals. Your organization will have to change that to ensure that business and IT teams work alongside one another to make digital transformation initiatives successful.
Which is the biggest sign of progress for digital transformation in your opinion? Share it with us in the comments section below.
