In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses face the imperative of transforming their operations to stay competitive and relevant. However, a staggering 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail. This blog post explores how S A Partners’ Digital Excellence Model can be used to improve your chances of success.
The Digital Transformation Challenge:
Despite the high demand for digital transformation, many initiatives fail because they lack alignment with the overarching business strategy. It’s essential to ensure that digital efforts support your business’s purpose and strategic goals otherwise you will risk investing your limited resources implementing technology that is either not used, and/or don’t contribute to you winning your key must-win battles.
Steps to Achieve Digital Excellence:
- Digital Strategy: Start by defining a digital strategy aligned with your business objectives. This strategy should articulate how technology will help you achieve your critical success factors and support your overarching purpose and should be the foundation for selecting the processes that you Digitally Transform.
- Change Management: Digital Transformation requires a culture of openness and acceptance of the introduction of new technology. Building this culture requires the wider organisation to understand the role that technology plays in executing your strategy and delving into your purpose. They need to understand why change is needed and how it will benefit them, their team, and the wider business.
- Standardize & Simplify: Don’t digitize a bad process. Simplify, Standardize, and Optimize your processes to prepare them for to be successfully Digitally Transformed to ensure that you don’t digitize your existing variation and waste.
- Digital Requirements: Determine the requirements of your future state Digital Process. What process steps and key behaviours does the new system need to facilitate? Be sure to also set ROI expectations and specify how success will be measured.
- Digitize & Automate: Evaluate the market to identify technology that will deliver your requirements. Where such technology doesn’t exist, make a decision to either reevaluate your requirements to bring them in line with what is available on the market or build a solution specific to your needs. Once a decision has been made the technology should be implemented and ready for use.
- Engagement & Capability: Ensure that your people know that their ways of working have changed and provide them with the skills to perform the new process in the Digital world.
Conclusion:
Digital transformation is more than just implementing new technology; it’s about aligning technology with your business strategy to achieve meaningful outcomes and focusing on bringing your people along for the ride. By following our structured approach to digital excellence, organizations can navigate the complexities of digital transformation and emerge stronger and more competitive.
