Importance of Embracing Digitalization
Setting yourself up for success is about more than just the right technology. It is about your overall digitalization strategy, process mapping, and most importantly—your people. A successful transformation means ensuring that your plan accelerates organizational agility throughout your business and across each of these five dimensions:
Strategy
To be successful, your digitalization strategy needs to create a shared purpose and vision across all teams within the organization. As outlined in Envisioning digital transformation, be sure to document your strategy and create visualizations to get everyone excited about the outcomes a new approach will drive for them, your customers, and the business.
Structure
Teaming, or how your teams operate in supporting customer outcomes, is essential to your business success. Your organizational structure needs to empower team alignment, accountability and collaboration. It is important to create role clarity and outline the expertise that is required to drive business impact. This can often require reskilling of employees to move your strategy forward.
Processes
Continuous process optimization is iterative innovation that every single person in your company needs to be accountable for driving. Employee engagement and retention is improved when people feel a sense of ownership and are rewarded for recommending changes that will improve departmental KPIs. Help encourage both adoption and process optimization in your digitalization strategy by tracking operational performance metrics tied to departmental processes.
People
Thriving in a rapidly changing market requires that every person in your business be able to adapt quickly to new ideas, products, and business models. Agility and adaptability are becoming the new measure of aptitude. Historically, companies focused on experience and expertise, or what is referred to as a person’s “Intelligence Quotient” (IQ). The new focus on digital advancement and agility has introduced the “Adaptability Quotient” (AQ), which measures a person’s ability to embrace change with an open mindset. There are ways to help your people improve their AQ to become more instrumental in driving innovation.
Technology
Technology is advancing rapidly, resulting in constantly evolving markets and customer expectations. Technology may be the foundation, but it is put into action through your strategy, structure, processes, and people. The most important part of this dimension is to keep from getting stuck on outdated platforms or legacy software that does not adapt with you as you change and grow. Simply implementing your initial digitalization strategy is not where you stop—adopting a culture of change makes for easier transitions to future technology and instills a company-wide acceptance of continuous innovation and improvement. Ensure your business management solution is as adaptable as your business and will grow with you.
