Being digital is no longer a competitive advantage for a business — it’s the price of admission. Businesses that aren’t focusing on their digital futures risk falling behind their competition.
But don’t think of digital transformation as something your business has to reluctantly trudge through. In fact, it could lead you down a better path, simplifying processes and taking mundane work out of your employees’ hands so they can focus on more meaningful tasks — and growing your customer base.
Let’s dive into what makes a good digital transformation strategy and why it’ll benefit your business.
Digital Transformation Defined
In a nutshell, digital transformation is the migration of manual and often time-consuming tasks and processes into a digital format.
For example, say your business has a manual process for reviewing invoices: One person receives the invoice and highlights the amount owed. They then hand it over to someone in management for approval. Once approved, the invoice goes to the CFO or bookkeeper, who finally makes the payment.
There are a few ways to digitally transform this process. Maybe you could skip the first step and have the invoice go straight to the bookkeeper’s inbox. Or set up a rule whereby any invoice over $50 is sent to management for approval, but anything below that amount is paid automatically.
Digital transformation initiatives are more than simply doing things “the same way, only digital.” It’s an opportunity to fully examine your business processes and find where you can trim the fat. Where can you be more efficient? Which tasks are redundant, and which processes make sense to merge with others?
Transformation is the real key word.
Why It’s Important for Your Business
Internal Benefits
Think about the most mundane, mind-numbing tasks you’ve ever had to do at any job. Did they make you happy? Did they feel rewarding and fulfilling? If we had to guess… probably not.
When you digitize repetitive, tedious tasks into automated processes, that lets your employees take on higher-level efforts that make a bigger impact. They’re free to focus on work that provides more benefits to the company and gives them greater job satisfaction.
Customer Benefits
Think of your Amazon orders. You place your order and are automatically sent a confirmation email. When your order ships, you’re automatically sent a notification to let you know. You even receive notifications on the day your order is arriving.
There isn’t a person manually sending these updates or giving you a phone call to alert you; they’re triggered by digital processes put in place, and you’re seeing the benefit.
Digital transformation automates tasks, and automation makes for repetition. Repetition leads to consistency, and a consistent experience (as long as it’s a good one) leads to a happy customer. And you know what happy customers can do for your business. This is a customer benefit and business benefit — win-win!
Related: How Often Should Our Business Upgrade Technology?
How to Digitize Successfully
1. Establish a Clear Goal
What do you want to achieve through a successful digital transformation? Fixing a certain pain point? Cost savings? A faster pace of innovation? Improved customer experiences?
Before taking more steps, first figure out what your goals are and what a successful transformation means. Your desired end result will drive which strategies you use to get there.
2. Clean Up Your Data
If your data is a mess to begin with, digitizing it won’t magically clean it up. A messy handwritten chart directly translated to Excel without changes will just lead to a messy Excel document.
This is your opportunity to better organize and update your data, and even add a data analytics process to use moving forward. Plus, information trapped inside silos needs to be brought into a single spot so everyone is working from the same data. High-quality business performance begins with high-quality data.
3. Identify Low-Hanging Fruit
Look for small, simple things you can improve first that will give you quick wins in the short term to start your digital transformation journey.
One great place to begin is with mileage reporting, if applicable. Traditionally, it’s a manual task; there’s paperwork involved and approvals are required. This is the perfect candidate for digital transformation.
Using an automated tool like MileIQ can help atomate much of this process. MileIQ and similar applications run on your phone, and when you start driving it tracks your mileage, showing your route on a map. From there, it automatically generates a report that’s fed into an HR or payroll system that calculate the reimbursement.
Transforming a relatively simple process first can show your employees the advantages of digitization and get them excited for more.
4. Include the Right People
Make sure you’re including your employees in the digital transformation — especially the people who will be most affected by the changes. Allow them to have input and be part of the process where it makes sense.
Employee involvement and buy-in gives you two major benefits. First, you’ll receive valuable input. As an owner or manager, you’re probably familiar with the process you want to improve, but you’re not doing it every day. You might not know the areas where the process is inefficient or just plain broken.
Second, your employees can help define what that new process will look like. If they’re involved in improving it, they’re more likely to embrace it.
5. Bring in an Expert
When you begin your digital transformation, be careful not to bite off more than you can chew.
Often, when you put a bunch of people in a room you’ll start talking about one process you want to improve. But that process connects with something else that involves another department. Before you know it, you’re trying to transform 16 different parts of your business.
A third-party expert keeps you focused and on track. In addition, they can serve as a mediator and ask the questions your staff may be afraid to ask.
Related: How Small Businesses See IT Managed Services Cost Savings
Call On Elevity to Help Transform Your Business
Elevity assists all types and sizes of organizations with digital transformation services, helping them clarify their business goals, get the right people involved and ask the questions that need to be asked — all while offering guidance at each step. When you come to us, we’ll keep everything on track for an efficient, successful transformation.
Want to see a real-world example of how Elevity helped one business completely overhaul their technology needs? Learn more on our resource page what happened when law firm Krekeler Strother turned to Elevity for strategic network and technology updates.
