Digital transformations aren’t designed for short-term gain. Thinking of a digital transformation as a set of activities designed to enhance your business processes or a solution to today’s issues instead of looking at it as a way to achieve agility, ensure your survival and engage a future filled with uncertainties could end up being dangerous. While disruptive companies are creating new ways of doing business, some companies are just trying to catch up with the new business engagement methods created by digital channels of communication.

Disruption is not new. It has been happening throughout this young planet’s history. The factor that’s changed is time — the speed of adoption. It used to take decades to achieve a critical mass for a new service offering or a new way of doing business, now it takes years or even months. This is the new terrain where the business game is being played. Keeping up with this new terrain requires planning and readiness. The time for enjoying success has diminished because competitors are emerging more quickly than before to take away some of your pie.

From The Ground Up

There’s no magic wand to be waved in order to start a digital transformation. Instead, you should consider your know-how, your added value, your key differentiators, your customer base, your processes and your limitations and opportunities, and take action in order to evolve to a transaction driven model. This model will allow you to orchestrate any form of business interaction and scale in a way that gives you a chance win your customer’s business on a daily basis, no matter how big your company gets.

Don’t Take Anything For Granted

Conditions and players change constantly and our sweet spots can be demolished by competitors if we are not evolving. Start by looking to achieve process automation on a transactional level. Know the gaps and opportunities your business has and own your limitations. Then, design a strategy, plan and fund it and empower your team, but do not delegate everything — you are the only one that really knows your business. Use agile methodologies and a dedicated team to oversee the strategy.

Plan to cut down on the chores that are not central to your business and digitize them so you can outsource them if you have not already done so. When using outsourcing services, do not look for the company with the cheapest interaction cost, look for the company with the business process that leads to the lowest total cost of ownership. Execute your plan by reusing those cost savings and hopefully incorporating some investment from your board as well.

Your plan should be based not only on addressing gaps and opportunities but also on attacking your business competitors while transforming your own business and offering. The combination of actual IT assets with new IT solutions, such as Internet of Things (IoT) or big data, could lead to legacy modernization and cloud services that can be applied to the gaps you have identified within your organization. The savings you can achieve by applying such technologies will also drive your investment budget. Focusing on your core business will provide the agility needed to keep evolving.