How to lead a digital transformation in your business

The businesses have realised the urgent need to transform digitally worldwide. But how to take first step towards this? What questions do we need to ask? What choices do we have and need to make? Will the organisation go along with it? How does that technology fit and work? What will the impact be on our employees? These are some of the important questions that keep company promoters hunting for an answer.

We can help you on your digital transformation confidently, by mitigating the right risks, seeking opportunities, and steering towards the effect you want to achieve.
Follow these five steps to help create a culture of continuous innovation.

A digital transformation can accelerate your growth, boost your productivity, and rapidly increase your bottom-line/profits.

Digital transformation is about much more than just getting new technological for employees. It means changing your company’s culture to use data and technology to make more informed, faster decisions and better meet customer needs. A critical element of the process is to adopt a culture of continual innovation and quality improvement.

In today’s world, everyone expects the speed, we need to deliver the things in quick time. But very few businesses have the culture of innovation they need to keep up with the fast-changing marketplace. Employees often do not feel encouraged to bring forth ideas about how to improve the business. Digital transformation is about fostering such an innovation culture.”

We believe entrepreneurs should follow below steps to lead a digital transformation successfully.

1. Prepare anenvironment of change.

The first step in a digital transformation is to establish why you’re doing it. Discuss with key employees to do a pain point assessment—a review of each area of the business to see what’s working well and what’s not.

Does your company need to improve customer service or reduce errors? Do you have poor internal communication? Are you losing business to competitors or struggling to fill orders?

Ask the following questions:

• What is the current reality, and how is it working?
• Where is your business fragmented today?
• Where do issues occur in each area of the business?
• Does everyone understand their role and the business vision?
• How well does information flow?

Most of the times, you get answers in safe zone, however, more you try to understand closely, there would be pain points to address as a solution.

Also have an honest look at your current technology, how you use data and any gaps in competencies, resources or buy-in for executing a transformation. Then, explore how digital technology and better data can help your business. Be sure to look at what your competitors and other industries are doing with technology.

2. Create a road map.

Solutions to your pain points don’t necessarily have to involve technology. But as part of a digital transformation, you should investigate how technology and better data can help in each area of the business.

Create a clear action plan for acquiring and implementing the technological solution. The plan should include key milestones for progress and steps your business will need to take to transform itself to maximize the benefits of the technology or data. Also build in contingency planning in case a step does not work out.

Try to include short-term targets for quick, easy wins to keep everyone motivated. These could be sure-fire projects that aren’t too costly or onerous to implement.

One of the things we hear a lot is, ‘We don’t want to do that because it’s going to be a really big project. Break it up into bite-sized pieces.

3. Establish a change management mechanism.

Getting employee buy-in starts from the top. Management has to not only understand the action plan and the need for change but lead the way in technology adoption.

Change will not take place if leadership does not exemplify it.

Create a “change coalition”—a team of influential employees from all ranks who believe strongly in the transformation and champion it to others. The coalition can include workers or managers most directly affected by the pain points, tech-savvy employees and even some who resist the change.

4. Engage and communicate.

have a clear communication plan to explain the change to your team, address employee concerns and quickly get feedback on hiccups. For example, you can give regular progress updates at company meetings, in newsletters or on a chart posted in the lunchroom.

5. Sustain a change culture.

You can easily find yourself slipping back into old ways if change doesn’t become core to your business mentality. The aim is to foster a culture of continual innovation and quality improvement.

“Make change part of your everyday language and culture. “You want to constantly be thinking about how you do things and how to do them better.”

A useful strategy is to regularly invite employees to come up with ideas for innovation—for example, with an ideas or suggestion box. Or go further and develop a structured innovation process. For instance, you can create an innovation team to regularly gather quality improvement ideas, brainstorm them and bring promising ones to management to consider developing.

It’s important to recognize and reward people for promoting change. You can recognize employees in internal communications and reward them with bonuses or points exchangeable for gifts. Celebrate hitting your action plan milestones. You can also help sustain a culture of change by monitoring key performance indicators. Use dashboards, newsletters and meetings to regularly inform employees about KPI achievements.