Key aspects of digital transformation

Digitising business processes around user and customer needs

Customer-centricity and user-focus should be at the heart of how you reimagine your processes for digital. You should rethink how to benefit the customer and then realign the value delivery processes with technology – to answer customer needs in the best possible way.

Converting an entire process to a digital form enables immediate benefits in terms of your ability to accelerate actions and search for information – but the transformation doesn’t stop there.

Once in a digital form, the process becomes easier to adjust and refine – enabling an iterative cycle of business improvement. When processes are digital, you can use cloud technologies to improve their cost-efficiency, scalability, agility and customer-centricity.

Creating new digital business processes

Digital transformation is not only about digitising your existing ways of working. You can also completely reinvent business processes – or create entirely new ones that were not previously possible. You should now think in terms of what the objectives of your processes actually are. With this view, you can create new and better digital processes to achieve these goals. 

Changing operations to digital

As transformation rolls out across your business, you move towards changing all your organisation’s operations to digital processes. Since these changes will affect the fundamental operations and culture of the business, they must be driven from the top of the organisation.

From manual steps to algorithms

A key aspect of digital transformation is the ability to start replacing manual steps in your business processes with algorithms. In other words, to automate the steps, rather than requiring a person to undertake that action. The algorithm may be relatively simple, such as based on a numerical formula or logical rule – or it may involve advanced data processing and artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning (ML) also has great potential to improve the efficiency of business processes.

Enhancing decisions with data

Digital transformation enables your business to support, augment and enhance human decision making with data and analytics. By consolidating information as digital data you can make it accessible to the decision-makers who need it. You also need to be able to interpret that data in a meaningful form to support business insights and decisions. So another key aspect of digital transformation is to enable intelligent analytics, data visualisations and interactive dashboards. These give your decision-makers a clearer overview of the situation, helping them make the optimum choice.

Transforming to a tech organisation

The long-term objective of all this is transforming your organisation to become a ‘technology organisation’. This does not mean that your business will change its industry sector – but rather that it embraces the advantages and methods of digital technology at every level.

In mid-2022, Elsewhen commissioned independent market research agency Vanson Bourne to conduct a research.

This research examines the extent to which organisations in the UK are applying effective digital approaches in their business.

Here are some of the key findings:

• Most organisations are likely to see themselves as digitally advanced—if not already as a ‘digital-first’ organisation (50%), then soon to be so (35%).

• Customers and employees are most likely to be regarded as an important part of digital strategy and digital projects—51% have run projects focusing on improving this in the last 12 months.

• Around one-sixth of IT budgets on average are assigned to digital projects and digitising processes.

• Despite optimism and pride (57% are extremely proud of their organisation’s approach to digital projects), nearly all (96%) say they’ve encountered unforeseen problems when running digital projects.

• All organisations surveyed use third-party digital consultants to some extent, often to overcome in-house skills gaps.

• Problems with digital projects, and the resulting negative impacts, can vary by organisation and by sector.

• Many organisations desire more technology-aware leadership and guidance when it comes to their digital projects.

• Unsuccessful digital projects can cause significant issues for organisations—impacting revenue and other areas.