Rossum Digital Transformation Series, Part 2: Why is Digital Transformation Important for Your Company?

Previously in our digital transformation series, we provided a concise overview of what digital transformation is. There’s more to it than, say, going paperless or moving certain processes to the cloud. We covered the four types of digital transformation that your organization needs to address to evolve and grow in today’s business world: transformation of business processes, business model, domain, and culture. In the second part of our three-part series, we’ll explore why digital transformation is important to your organization.

Survival is an obvious incentive for launching a digital transformation program. But if your organization limits its purpose to simply remaining competitive, it could find itself constantly playing catch-up with everyone else in your industry. That means dedicating resources and budget to goalposts that are continuously moving forward.

Before making such a costly commitment, your company should understand the purposes for digital transformation. In other words, you should be able to answer a question that is as simple as it is crucial: Why are we doing this?

The answers to these questions can have a massive influence on your digital strategies. Let’s take a look at the key reasons why digital transformation is important to your company.

Increase Productivity

The technology you deploy as part of your digital transformation strategy enables your workforce to focus more on value-generating activities rather than repetitive manual tasks. For example, you can replace manual data entry with robotic process automation (RPA) solutions. The resulting time savings allow employees to get more done without interruption.

Improve Cross-Functional Collaboration

Digital transformation can improve collaboration between functions, further boosting productivity across your organization. On individual, team, and organizational levels, the digital transformation of business processes can streamline cross-functional operations, enhance alignment between departments, and strengthen your company’s culture.

Gain More Valuable Data-Based Insights

Your company’s digital transformation can help ensure you have the high-quality data and analytics tools you need for business growth. A data-driven culture enables your organization to establish its business growth objectives and optimize operations more efficiently. Data analytics enable you to identify market trends more quickly and make smarter business decisions, helping you gain a competitive edge.

Boost Agility and Innovation

According to a 2017 CIO Insight study, 68 percent of companies consider business agility as one of the three most vital initiatives. If your organization is among those businesses, it should be 

• prepared to adapt and innovate
• willing to experiment
• capable of accepting – and learning from – failure

Your digital transformation strategy can help your company achieve all of this and keep pace with the continuously, and rapidly, evolving digital landscape.

Even those on top must be ready to adapt and innovate. There will always be new competition, new tools, and new trends. Staying ready is crucial.

– DMI Blog, What Are the Benefits of Digital Transformation?

Upgrade Employee Skills and Promote a Digital Culture

Simply adopting digital tools and moving some processes to the cloud is going to make a minor impact, improving efficiency here and cutting costs there. A truly effective digital transformation facilitates a cultural shift that strengthens employees’ digital capabilities. This will equip your company with an agile, digital-savvy workforce that ensures sustainable business growth.

In this context, your digital transformation will also have a more human benefit as it will boost employee morale. Tools like RPA software, AI-powered document processing applications, and cloud-based collaboration platforms will optimize workforce performance. On an individual level, digital tools can eliminate repetitive manual tasks, allowing employees to work more efficiently and effectively, and ultimately boosting employee satisfaction. From a departmental perspective, real-time information sharing and anywhere-anytime collaboration capabilities can vitalize teamwork and innovation.

Get the Most Out of Your Digital Workforce

In a sense, your workforce is also continuously going through its own sort of digital transformation. In its Technology Vision 2019 report, Accenture states:

Across industries and organizations, workers are incorporating technology to build on their own inherent skills and experience. The workforce is becoming “human+”: each individual is empowered by their skillsets and knowledge plus a new, constantly growing set of capabilities made possible through technology.

As much as this gives your company new opportunities for growth, it also presents challenges to your operations. While your digital transformation strategy can empower your workforce, you need to be aware that traditional training methods can, according to Accenture, “limit resources to employees who have been approved for certain learning opportunities” and provide them with skills that will benefit your organization today, but not necessarily tomorrow.

A more inclusive forward-looking digital transformation plan, will better prepare your workforce to adapt quickly to changes in the constantly evolving digital landscape. Fortunately, your human+ workers are keen and capable of learning and adopting new technologies. This is especially true of millennials, 40 percent of whom regard professional development nearly as important as salary. A digital transformation strategy that takes this into account will not only attract up-and-coming talent, your company will be better equipped to accommodate that talent.

Keep Up With Your Tech-Savvy Employees

Workers across all industries have digital experience and know-how that can bring a wealth of value to their employers. However, you may find your organization lags behind them in this respect. When these tech-savvy employees need to adhere to legacy systems and outdated processes, the disconnect can have a negative impact across your company.

Digital transformation can, and should, create an environment in which your workforce thrives. This offers a great opportunity for your company to seize a significant competitive advantage. Referring once again to Accenture:

Technology innovation combined with increasing employee velocity has created an ever-expanding number of potential paths for workers to explore. But that also means an increasing number of career paths for businesses to identify, manage, and support—and so far, companies have not kept up.

Ensuring you can keep pace with today’s digital workforce will grow in importance in the coming years. Your digital transformation initiative will be instrumental in achieving this. 

Improve Customer Experience

As your digital transformation enhances operations internally, your customers benefit. For example:

• Streamlined processes can lead to faster delivery times
• More precise insights can lead to more personal, and more satisfying, customer journeys
• Improved agility and innovation can lead to additions and/or improvements to your product or service portfolio

Make the Paperless Office a Reality

While it’s the last point in our list of reasons why digital transformation is important for your company, eliminating paper is significant. Not only is going paperless ecological, it also reduces costs. In addition to eliminating the expenses of paper itself, digital operations save you the cost of storing and processing paper documents.

Increase the Effectiveness of Remote Working 

As remote work has become the norm for the time being – and may stay that way for quite some time – your company has probably already undergone some form of digital transformation. While your workforce may have been forced to make the shift to home office suddenly, taking the time to review and improve your organization’s approach to remote working will help maximize all the benefits it has to offer. Additionally, you’ll be able to strengthen your digital transformation strategy for when it’s finally time to return to the office.

Next Up In Rossum’s Digital Transformation Series

Come on back to our blog for the final installment of our three-part digital transformation series for a short guide on how to prepare and deploy your digital transformation strategy.

Ps. Missed part 1 of our Digital Transformation series? Read it here:
Digital Transformation Series, Part 1: What is Digital Transformation?