How to Overcome some of Digital Transformation Hurdles
Digital Transformation Hurdles and how to Overcome some fo them you might wonder? Digital Transformation can be an intimidating task to undertake. Mostly due to some of the hurdles that most businesses need to overcome to make the digital transformation successful. Below we’ll be going through some of these hurdles, to bring them to light and offer some solutions. Hopefully, this will alleviate some of the intimidation, and help you achieve successful digital transformation
Strategy
When it comes to implementing digital transformation into your business, it is vital to have a good strategy in place.
While digital transformation is a business-wide endeavour, it helps to start small. Trying to change everything all at once, is a quick way to burn out and fail your attempt. Starting small ensures that you don’t hinder your current business processes to deter employees.
Focus more on one goal or department at a time – for obvious reasons – focus on the most important ones first. Implementing one part at a time, helps you maintain control over changes and reduce the stress on the overall business.
Lastly, make sure to communicate your strategy with all employees. It does not help to have management onboard when employees don’t know what’s going on. Keeping all employees in the loop helps keep them engaged and produce results.
Employee Reluctance
As with anything, change can be scary. This fear will come in the form of pushback from both employees and management. Mainly because they are stuck in their ways and even fear for their jobs.
The saying goes “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, and while there is some truth to that, it doesn’t say don’t improve it. And that is what digital transformation is all about.
Legacy methods are tried and true, but digital transformation is here to better inefficient work
and business processes.
Combatting the reluctance also comes down to communication. Letting the employees know how these changes will improve the quality of their work, and easing their minds by keeping them involved during these changes.
Customer Experience
Customer Experience is one of – if not the most – important factors to consider when implementing digital transformation. Due to the impact customer feedback and reviews have on a business.
Having means of collecting usable customer data, helps to improve customer experience. By delivering personalised, user-friendly and streamlined interactions.
Again, good strategy comes into play, as you don’t want your digital transformation to interfere with a good customer experience. On the other hand, digital transformation can be used to identify customer needs, and deliver them seamlessly.
Security
Access to so much data and a lot of it is sensitive information, means that it needs to be secure. Data and cybersecurity is quite a big hurdle to overcome when dealing with digital transformation.
You do not want to become a victim to a cyberattack, leaving your or your customers’ data vulnerable to cybercriminals.
Incorporating cloud services for the storage of information and data can be a valuable asset. Cloud services normally come equipped with security measures in place that are regularly updated, to keep up with cybercriminals.
Skills
It is important to ensure that you have the people with the necessary skills at hand when implementing digital transformation.
Trying to use your current workforce for your digital transformation could prove problematic. Firstly, they may not have the knowledge necessary to understand the technologies. Secondly, if they need to split their time between digital transformation and their normal jobs, it could reduce the results on both fronts.
You need to ensure you have a dedicated team, with the necessary skills. That will allow them the time and effort needed to focus and deliver. While having minimum impact on current business.