Creating A Digital Transformation Roadmap

25th Jun 2021

Transitioning your business from older ways of working to a more modern approach is no easy feat. That’s why a digital transformation roadmap is so important to your success. There are multiple digital transformation steps for success that require an almost constant level of development and management to bring departments and processes into line and get your business working in a more interconnected way. We outline the approach below:

Creating a digital transformation roadmap

To properly ascertain a strategy for your digital transformation, it is important to assess your current aspirations (the drive why you want to transform) then look for the weak points in your processes.

A good way to start is by breaking your roadmap up into four parts:

Consider your customers/partners

One of the main reasons organisations undertake digital transformation processes is to be more efficient – either in winning new business or serving existing customers. So think about processes from a customer-centric point of view.

Look at your business processes and where they either fail your customers and/or partners currently, or could be improved. This is an important distinction to establish – while it’s easy to decide upon wholesale transformation of your processes, doing so can alienate customers/partners if you change something they like about the way you do business. You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Testimonial can help here – approach customers/partners with whom you have particularly strong relationships and ask for their feedback. If your services aren’t performing, they’re more likely to honestly tell you where. And it may not be where you think.

Assess your process

This next digital transformation step is geared towards streamlining your business processes.

Don’t try to do everything at once. Instead, use customer and internal feedback, and your business plans around how you’d like to scale, to target which processes to improve first.

Then get granular. Work out all of the steps of the particular process, who is involved, what systems are used and what the end result is. If needs be, have your team undertake a time and motion study to establish which part of the process is the most time consuming.

It’s then time to work out how to do those tasks faster.

Inspect your current technology

For many organisations, technology will be the solution to getting tasks done faster.

A well-laid-out digital transformation roadmap for your business will take hardware, software and data analysis into account. This can all help you create usable, meaningful data that can provide accurate analytics to boost your productivity.
But remember that technology is the enabler, not the end result. So don’t be tempted to invest before you know exactly what the problems are.

You also don’t necessarily need to spend big to see big improvements. But you do need to be strategic. Establish what needs replacing, investigate what can do the job better, and consider how this solution will scale with you and fit with wider technologies that you use.

Plan user adoption early

It is important that you get your staff on board early on so that they can quickly adapt to any changes that will emerge as a result of your digital transformation steps.

Too often, the end user is the last to know about change. This causes resistance to (and potential failure of) the project.
People don’t like change. But if you can prove to them that it’s about making their job easier then they’re more likely to be receptive.

And if you engage them from the start of your digital transformation roadmap, they may even be able to point out the problem areas to you.

Partner with experience

Building a digital transformation roadmap for your business can be a lengthy process. If it’s rushed, it can create problems or poor return on investment.

It therefore can be hugely beneficial to work with a third-party specialist to support you with these intricate projects. They’ll know what’s worked for other businesses and what the pitfalls are.

With proper planning and the right expertise, moving your business forward should be a painless, continual process.

To discuss the management of your digital transformation roadmap with us please get in touch:

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