The ‘Digital Way’ is the new buzzword that everyone, from market trends and analyst reports seems to be talking about. Any transformation that you want to adopt today to move up the value chain requires a Digital flavor. So, what does ‘going digital’ actually mean? Is it about implementing a new technology, a mindset change, a new business model or a mix of all these?
‘Going Digital’ can be broken into five distinct steps that can be adopted by organizations for better business growth, customer satisfaction, loyalty & advocacy.
Step 1: Know the Success Parameters - which directly contribute to seamless transformation to digital global business services. These parameters are : compliance and control - for better process execution; risk and operational efficiency - for maximizing and accelerating return on investment; business enablement - through usage of analytics and decision support for predictable customer insights and customer experience. Balanced focus on all three parameters are key to success.
Step 2: Identify organization’s maturity level - Plot your organization’s position in the trajectory between traditional business operations & digitized operations, considering digitalization as an incremental progression from centralized and standardized operations. Organizations operating in the lower end of the shared services maturity curve must identify the need for re-engineering. This is a key step for planning change & talent management for organizations at the cusp of centralizing and digitizing their operations.
Step 3: Embark on a transformational journey - Launch transformation initiatives, with a clear process map and focus on enterprise operations across the business value chain. Leverage best available process re-engineering methodologies and enhance productivity through streamlined practices. This can lead to lean optimized processes, implementation of tools for controls and compliance, and standardization of activities, before advancing to digitization and achieving process excellence across all touch-points.
Step 4: Adopting Digital - Adopt a fresh approach to transformation of operations considering the concepts of ‘Simplification’, ‘Automation’, ‘Intelligence’, and ‘Immersive Experience’. This transformation journey towards Digital is not a small step change driven by point automations but a disruptive change in the labor value chain of how tasks and outcomes are delivered. This is crucial to control the cost-to-serve, improve revenues and enhance customer experience, covering all aspects of front office, middle office and back office transformation. The enterprise operation transformation approach should address the typical operational challenges to eliminate routine task with focus on ‘Digital Labor’ as a key pillar with use of Robotic Process Automation, Machine Learning, Cloud Enabled Process as a Service and Artificial Intelligence concepts to achieve technology driven automation and best-in-class process efficiency.
Step 5: Improving Excellence Quotient With business growth as the exclusive objective at this stage, the organization prepares to deliver on long-term organizational goals, and experience exponential growth patterns and profitability. The performance must be expected to be at its peak with three key success parameters to attain the desired outcomes and having balanced focus, namely:
- Compliance and Control - Do we have greater control on disruptive business environment?
- Operational Efficiency - What are the Incremental digital led savings?
- Business Enablement - Are we empowered through Intelligent Insight on customer behavior and expectations?
Digital inclusion is no more an option, but a necessity. If you want to stay relevant and competitive today, it is imperative to have a solid digital transformation strategy in place. For, this is just the beginning…
