Last year, spending on digital transformation reached $2.15 trillion globally. Around the world, businesses in all sectors face continued pressure to streamline operations and provide better service to their customers. This total is expected to reach $3.9 trillion by 2027. For many organisations, though, the complexity surrounding the creation and ongoing maintenance of new technology-driven processes continues to stand in the way of turning digital investment into impact. According to McKinsey & Co’s research, around 70% of digital transformation efforts fail. At the same time, just one in eight digital transformation initiatives meeting their objectives.
Economic pressures continue to take their toll on budgets. As such ensuring digital transformations are successful has never been more critical. However, the journey isn’t always a simple one. Starting a digital transformation project can often be perceived as time-consuming, complex, and expensive. Processes are hard to find, out of date, and difficult to understand. Often, teams that inherit processes experience a loss of context and control over them. Meanwhile, employees impacted by the transformation are often averse to change, making the thought of overhauling existing processes far from inviting.
But it doesn’t have to be this way…
The secrets to success:
1. Knowing where to start…
… can often be complex and discouraging for those getting started with digital transformation. Before a process can be fixed or optimised, it must first be uncovered and analysed. Fortunately, there are tools available that can take the pain away from process discovery. They do this by creating a detailed map of all workflows scattered across the entire business.
Process mapping is the practice of looking at all the actions that your organisation does and visualising them in the form of a map. These processes can occur daily, monthly, or even annually, be it small or large. By creating this map, organisations can get a better understanding of how they are going to accomplish their goals. Mapping processes also allows the business to understand the direct and indirect impacts that changing one process might have on another, as well as the knock-on effect this could have on people, skills, systems, compliance and cost.
2. Centralising processes
… is the next step on the journey to success. Digital transformation projects often require the development and improvement of multiple processes. Therefore, using Platform-as-a-Service technologies that can help centralise and connect these processes in an easy-to-use interface is essential. Challenges and causes for transformation are also generally not limited to a single department. Therefore, it’s important that multiple stakeholders across the business can have sight of these processes and their impact.
3. Getting employee buy-in…
… and engaging key stakeholders, however, is half the battle when embarking on a digital transformation project. Collaboration is key when it comes to success, so those driving transformation projects must involve those whom it will impact, from the offset. Ultimately, your team needs to understand what the problem is, and why you’re changing it. The projects that see the most success are led by those who take the end-user on the journey with them, rather than presenting them with the end product to find it either isn’t user-friendly or doesn’t fully address the original need.
Utilising human-centric tools for digital transformation is crucial to overcoming this. Day-to-day employees can only be invested in the project if they can be involved in the development.
However, often due to complexity, transformation efforts are siloed to developers and those with technical skills. By embracing Platform-as-a-Service software that maps and centralises processes with a highly collaborative and intuitive user interface, organisations can engage business users, IT professionals, and process experts in mapping workshops, where employees can see their changes brought to life in real-time, and the impact created. Collaboration of this kind can also help to spark new ideas for further improvements throughout the transformation journey.
4. Having access to the necessary tools for change…
…may seem obvious, but often process mapping software used by businesses does exactly what it says on the tin, leaving the transformation of these processes and finding the tools to do so, another task in itself. This is where adopting process mapping technology that can integrate with workflow automation tools such as RPA, AI and low-code development, is extremely beneficial. Being able to easily adopt these tools accelerates transformation efforts, meaning change happens faster, more efficiently, and with better results.
Ultimately, the secret to a successful digital transformation project is to empower those responsible for building processes to do so simply. Offering them the ability to document and continually improve the processes consistently and at scale, by removing duplication and eliminating errors, saves time.
By adopting robust and holistic tools that centralise the storage of process creation, whilst offering the integration of technology such as automation to uncover actionable insights and efficiencies, organisations can transform at speed. And this ensures a strong ROI on their digital transformation investment.
- Digital Strategy
