Six ways to implement a digital transformation

With a lot of your audience now being online, it’s important you keep up with the demand. Implementing digital technology isn’t just about keeping up with the times; it's about driving innovation, enhancing efficiency, and maximising growth opportunities. While these steps aren’t exhaustive, here are 6 steps and tips to implement digital transformation. 

DEFINE THE VISION

It’s important to define a clear digital transformation vision and strategy that aligns with the company’s goals and objectives. This can be done by identifying opportunities, the digital initiatives that can help your business succeed, and what you need to do to achieve it. 

STRATEGY

To implement the desired vision, a robust strategy should be developed and put in place. This could be by conducting and developing a readiness assessment to see if your business is prepared for change and what is doable. From leadership, culture, technology used, to data management. Then, you can analyse and develop what steps need to be taken to prepare the business. It’s important that you also prioritise your digital transformation and take it step by step implementing. Rome wasn’t built in a day, so make sure your business isn’t taking on too many new digital initiatives for it to carry.

ALIGNMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

Once objectives and goals have been defined and strategised, align them with your business. You could develop a detailed roadmap to achieve the desired vision through the likes of a timeline and budget. Once you’ve assessed the current capabilities, it’s important to identify what’s needed and how to implement the key initiatives to start your digital transformation journey. Gathering this data is crucial, as it backs up why you should be making these changes and the difference it will make to your ROI. This will help get your team on board. It’s important to ensure they’re ready to change the way they work, so communication is key. It’s a good idea to identify and assign key responsibilities to key people for certain stages. This could be someone who understands certain stages on a deeper level, so the team knows who to go to if they need help during the implementation process. 

MONITORING PROGRESS

Once the implementation is underway, monitoring the progress of your digital transformation is crucial. These things take time, so monitoring lets you ensure things are running on track according to the project completion rate and keep track of the adoption rate. You can also take this time to see what is working and what isn’t based on the likes of employee productivity, and make changes if they are needed.  

BABY STEPS TO ALLOW EXPANSION

While monitoring progress, you can monitor the return on investment achieved based on the amount invested initially. During this time, it’s also important to assess the level of innovation based on the new technology and processes implemented. By focusing on what’s been successful, you can see where your business can focus on digital innovation, or even expand in a particular area. This could be by hiring new talent, developing partnerships, or allowing for new experimentation or training development. 

COMPLIANCE,COMPLIANCE,COMPLIANCE

Throughout the digital transformation process, it’s important to ensure that you’re measuring your business’ level of security and taking the steps needed to stay and be compliant, such as data protection and privacy. You should do this by running your initial digital transformation plans past your legal team or IT experts.

 It’s important to note that this whole process should always be collaborative at every step, with the likes of employees, customers and partners being involved to help with buy-in, as well as insights and expertise from different angles. It’s also crucial to identify the KPIs. From defining the vision, to helping measure the impact of the digital transformation from different areas of the business. This can be the likes of digital culture, revenue growth, customer satisfaction and brand awareness. By monitoring your business’ KPIs, it’ll help you measure your ROI when implementing these changes – giving you insight into the difference digital transformation will truly have.

While digital transformation may affect your business now, it presents a whole host of other opportunities. At Code Milk, we harness the power of digital marketing to propel your business forward with our expert strategies. From analysis, identifying opportunities, and impactful planning, we can ensure your business stands out in the crowded digital landscape. 

Explore Code Milk’s services today and see what we can offer to futureproof your business for it to grow. 

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Sources: 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/digital-transformation-implementation-oladimeji-kazeem/ https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/blog/collaboration/implement-digital-transformation