What is a Digital Transformation Strategy?
The goal of a digital transformation strategy is to leverage technology to better serve customers, to improve productivity of employees, and to generate positive business outcomes.
Digital transformation initiatives require organizations to re-invent themselves. All aspects of the organization may undergo change, from business workflows, to day-to-day procedures carried out by employees, to new roles and organizational structures.
A digital transformation strategy should not only look at near term objectives like delivering a digital experience to specific customers or automating certain processes. It should broadly consider how the organization will compete in the digital economy in the years to come.
This requires a deep understanding of the organization, its strengths and weaknesses, the competitive environment, and the needs and wants of customers.
In this article
Why is Digital Transformation Important?
According to Gartner, Digital Transformation can refer to anything from IT modernization (for example, cloud computing), to digital optimization, to the invention of new digital business models. The term is widely used in public-sector organizations to refer to modest initiatives such as putting services online or legacy modernization. Thus, the term is more like “digitization” than “digital business transformation.”
Digital transformation is critical for business success in the 21st century. Companies are investing in their digital strategy, and are seeing positive returns:
- The digital transformation market is rapidly growing, expected to reach $3.2 trillion by 2025.
- According to Accenture research, 76% of senior executives believe that organizations need to improve their digital customer experience.
- Companies with digital-first strategies were 64% more likely to exceed their revenue goals.
- According to Deloitte, business transformation is tied to revenue—of companies that saw a positive impact from their digital strategy, 45% said it directly increased revenues.
What Should a Digital Transformation Strategy Include?
Here are a few elements that your organization should include when building its digital strategy:
- People—who will execute the strategy, including senior management, developers, marketers, data analysts, content writers.
- Process—how will the team work together to make the digital strategy a reality, and how will the organization make the transition.
- Platform—what technological tools the organization will use to execute the strategy, and how it will use them.
- Content—what content will be needed to support the digital strategy, and how will it be created and managed.
- Data—how will the team collect, store, and analyze data to make decisions.
- Measurement—how will the organization measure success, and what metrics should be tracked.
- Products—what products or services will be produced, and how their characteristics or delivery will change in line with the digital strategy.
- Partners—who do you need to work with to make the strategy a reality.
- Customers—who the digital strategy is intended to serve, and how the team will understand their needs and behaviors.
4 Tips for a Successful Digital Transformation
Here are a few ways you can ensure your digital transformation initiative is a success.
1. Focus on Customer Experience
When implementing new technologies, a customer-centric approach is essential. Choose a technology that can enhance your customer’s user experience.
Companies in different industries, serving different audiences, require different digital strategies. This applies for online, offline and store channels. Today’s customers are impatient and demand immediate satisfaction. Implement digital transformation to guide customers to buy or perform the required action in the shortest possible time. If there are places customers are getting stuck or frustrated, make them a focus of your digital strategy.
Related content: read our guide to digital transformation for business
2. Implement Digital Strategy Gradually
Digital transformation projects are a long-term undertaking. Avoid putting employees and customers at risk, or overwhelming them, with large, sudden changes. Pace out digital initiatives in stages, provide training to employees and customers (if relevant), and implement all changes at an easy-to-digest pace.
3. Cooperation and Cultural Change
All employees must be involved in digital transformation. This requires a cultural change across the enterprise. Communication between all departments is critical to success. It is advisable to appoint a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) or digital transformation expert within your organization—these roles can help drive the cultural change.
4. Monitor Return on Investment
Financial returns are a great way to measure value and demonstrate the success of digital transformation. Monitor revenue in business units affected by the digital strategy, and adjust strategy as needed. The end goal of most digital initiatives is increased revenue and/or reduced operating costs—see that this is really happening, and if not, prioritize your resources to achieve the best results.
Digital Transformation Strategy with Perception Point
As work from home and BYOD trends become key to workers increasing their productivity, they also open your business up to IT and security risks. With Perception Point, corporate data are fully protected, so your team can work wherever it suits them, and on the device of their choice — a key feature of all successful digital transformations.
While going through a digital transformation process, businesses need to focus on processes that help their teams to work more quickly, and more effectively. Perception Point supports digital transformation at scale by providing enterprise-grade security to protect email, browsers, cloud collaboration platforms and proprietary apps from all types of cyberattacks.
An all-included managed Incident Response service is available for all customers 24/7. Perception Point’s team of cybersecurity experts will manage incidents, provide analysis and reporting, and optimize detection on-the-fly. The service drastically minimizes the need for internal IT or SOC team resources, reducing the time required to react and mitigate web-borne attacks by up to 75%.
Customers deploying the solution will experience fewer breaches, while providing their users with a better experience as they have the freedom to browse the web, use SaaS applications that they require, and access privileged corporate data, confidently, securely, and without added latency.
Contact us for a demo of our Advanced Threat Prevention solutions, today.
The goal of a digital transformation strategy is to leverage technology to better serve customers, to improve productivity of employees, and to generate positive business outcomes. A digital transformation strategy should not only look at near term objectives like delivering a digital experience to specific customers or automating certain processes. It should broadly consider how the organization will compete in the digital economy in the years to come.
Here are a few elements that your organization should include when building its digital strategy:
– People—who will execute the strategy, including senior management, developers, marketers, data analysts, content writers.
– Process—how will the team work together to make the digital strategy a reality, and how will the organization make the transition.
– Platform—what technological tools the organization will use to execute the strategy, and how it will use them.
– Content—what content will be needed to support the digital strategy, and how will it be created and managed.
– Data—how will the team collect, store, and analyze data to make decisions.
Measurement—how will the organization measure success, and what metrics should be tracked.
– Products—what products or services will be produced, and how their characteristics or delivery will change in line with the digital strategy.
– Partners—who do you need to work with to make the strategy a reality.
– Customers—who the digital strategy is intended to serve, and how the team will understand their needs and behaviors.
Here are a few ways you can ensure your digital transformation initiative is a success.
1. Focus on Customer Experience
2. Implement Digital Strategy Gradually
3. Cooperation and Cultural Change
4. Monitor Return on Investment
