7 Critical Errors in Digital Transformation

In today’s digital technology-centric business environment, organizations are continuously under pressure to create, execute and achieve a successful digital transformation strategy. New requirements need modern solutions. Though digital strategy can have surprising outcomes when done right, it can be costly and painful for business when done wrong.

Digital technologies and customer demands are evolving and changing day by day. This improvement brings its own rules into our lives with a dominant attitude, as if the same rules were valid yesterday, without giving us a chance to be surprised. Businesses should not forget that digital transformation is an integral part of staying current in their market. Organizations that fail to fully analyze how to develop their day-to-day operations during this transformation will have to face failure in implementing modern technologies.

If you can predict what will happen when you set foot on the unfrozen ice floor, it shouldn’t be too difficult to predict what will happen in the digital transformation process. Let’s examine the mistakes made under 7 main headings. Perhaps we will support you to optimize your digital transformation plans. Let’s see what those others did:

Unfortunately, you didn’t misread. Everyone knows that digital transformation is a must. But when this transformation is tried to be done without preparing the ground that needs it, unfortunately it causes chaos. The answer to this massive mistake most companies make is simple: Plan, prepare, set your goals, create a roadmap, and then embark on your digital transformation journey.

Before boarding on digital transformation, it is necessary to ensure that the organization is ready for change. Being ready for change goes beyond being able to deploy new processes and tools. One of the critical thresholds is for companies to adopt a new operational model and ensure that the implementation of a correct digital transformation strategy does not change the company culture. The basis of any successful change should be effective personalized communication and preparing the right structural positions. The priority of companies should be to be able to show a proactive approach to all kinds of opportunities and challenges that come their way, and to establish an agile and scalable system.

The customer-driven approach should be at the top of the list of leaders in the digital transformation journey. The technology should provide customers with an enhanced digital experience and minimize adaptation time. Consumers today demand flexibility and personalized ‘customer-oriented’ service.

In a study (Mckinsey), digital transformation focused on customer experience can provide 20-30% increase in customer satisfaction and 20-50% economic gain.

The main goal should be to optimize the customers’ purchasing experience before and after. Although the general rules are defined, since the customer behavior of each business will differ, creating a unique process in the light of data and analysis provides an advantage in the competition process. For any digital business transformation, technology is at the heart of it. The small detail here is that although the technology applied is difficult to use, your customers will be in the visible part of that technology. A smooth experience will bring a happy customer, and a happy customer will bring you success. Now, how you define success is entirely up to you.

One of the reasons for the failure of digital transformation is the lack of talents management within the organization. In addition, the inability to choose the right platform and technology to use for an integrated solution remains a major challenge among organizations during their digital transformation journey.

The leadership should engage with their CIO to gain insight into the best technology for managing and adapting the capabilities needed to achieve successful digital transformation. In-house talent management can be a hectic job for some businesses due to the nature of their business. In this case, consulting firms that successfully implement digital transformations can always be chosen.

Leaders must decide between a Siloed or Non-Siloed approach, considering the nature and structure of their organization. Before specifying, it is necessary to define the Silo approach; It would not be wrong to define it as adjusting the degree of communication between departments within an organization.

The silo approach delivers optimization of efficiency by driving digital transformation in products and services within the organization. In this way, leaders can ensure that the failure of one does not affect the other. The silo approach can also be applied when you identify only a few parts or products of your company that need digital transformation.

When digital transformation is seen as the coming together of small parts and the formation of a large whole from these interactions, it is of great importance for those small parts to know their own role. It should be instilled in the corporate culture by leaders that the insights of opportunity or risk will multiply a collaborative effort and ensure that everyone embraces the value of their position.

Digital transformation process implementation is part of continuous transformation. A constantly innovative and agile culture should be the second top priority after initiating the digital transformation process. Agile culture supports the evolution cycle of the ever-increasing business mindset.

Identify the risk that may arise in the future. The ever-developing agile approach will help protect the organization from threats that may happen to businesses due to the digital transformation process. Scalability and future evolution are the keys that open the door to addressing the various issues that may come your way in the future.

Each asset of digital transformation will have variable levels of risk and return factors. So, each will be handled through Iterative Execution. Iterative Execution exists beyond the software development cycle. Iterative Execution provides speed and momentum as they complement each other to help reduce the risk of the entire digital transformation process failing. So, with digital start-ups already in business, it’s time for businesses to adapt to Iterative practice.

Innovation speed is an important benchmark in determining the speed of innovative processes that can be adapted to digital transformation processes. Considering a large funnel of ideas, each run at high speed and at low cost, may be the best approach.

It’s great for low-cost and high-speed iterations when starting out, working on large projects and ideas. Agility is the motivation of start-ups. The main goal of these businesses should be to create a model that works equally well for large, medium, and small businesses to process ideas quickly and iteratively.