Digital transformation is no longer an option. Companies need to permanently change the way they do business. This change incorporates how they interact with both employees and customers.
Digital transformation means different things to different businesses. For transformation to succeed, it requires alignment across your entire business—including investment dollars, priorities, measurement and metrics, and a path to execution.
At the Mentor List, we have identified the five pillars that all corporations need to address in order to achieve success. The five pillars of a digital transformation are a foundation for alignment and prioritization that allow you to optimize investment in people, technology, and time.
Establishing your vision and a strategy to achieve that vision is the most challenging pillar. The vision needs to have buy-in from across the company, starting with the CEO. It’s critical to create the foundation by which everyone can agree to prioritize funding and resources, and identify any processes that need to be changed along the way. Digital transformation impacts everyone from IT and marketing to customer service and sales.
Customers are at the core of every business’s digital transformation. As we create your roadmap and priorities, we start with the customer in mind. We begin by addressing customer pain points. By evaluating, correlating, and understanding these pain points we identify both the quick wins and the priority areas that will take more time and investment. We will develop a journey map which will give you a visual interpretation of the overall story.
Digital transformation is no longer an option. Companies will permanently change the way they do business. Technology is at the core of customer-facing channels (online, mobile, and in store), IT platforms (inventory, billing, service/ticketing), and manufacturing environments.
New platforms will need to be implemented. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) will need to be implemented. Data cleanup will be necessary and end of life (EOL) plans for legacy technologies will be required.
Metrics are a key part of managing your progress towards transformation Every project needs to be outcome-based. Information Technology (IT) metrics will vary based on the complexity of the work and the age and complexity of the systems involved.
Governance is critical to move your digital transformation strategy forward. Digital transformation is a multi-year program; openly sharing priorities, key drivers for those priorities, investment needs and timing will help. Governance can be used to remove roadblocks in processes. The governance model you choose to put in place is the influencing body for the changes needed.
