Harnessing the Opportunities of Digital Transformation
by Abdul Aziz Mondal Business Development Published on: 24 October 2017 Last Updated on: 21 October 2024
You are the chief operations manager in an organization that specializes in financial services and wealth management. The firm prides itself on providing sound investments and financial advice to individuals and corporate clients interested in buying long-term and low-risk gain strategy. This firm is soon undertaking a digital overhaul that will make sure that it remains in the precinct of the industry. The expectation is that through the implementation of transformation strategies, business functions and processes need to be up to date, and they will set the firm competitively for the future.
As the operations manager, you bear the whole responsibility for transformational change that is going on across the organization. You realize that to bring the required transformation about, you need to drive the implementation and creation of innovative strategies that will support the overarching corporate aims.
It is important that you take help from experts who are already proficient in the field. They can help you prioritize the platforms and the strategies, which can help you carry forward the digital transformation effectively. If you can get it now, you will be able to prepare well for the year 2021. Businesses, which have suffered because of the pandemic need to ensure that they are able to make the digital transformation as soon as possible. This will not only allow them to piggy back on the new consumer wave but also create a digital-first business, which will be future-proof.
How do you start?
Business processes and digital transformation
Digital transformation is all about improving the performance of business dramatically through re-alignment of existing and integrating new technologies. The core part of this requires changing business processes that will improve end-to-end performance.
From the process perspective, digital transformation enables the firm to enhanced efficiency through automation of manual procedures, create novel workflows that will maximize the digital channels, integrate customer experiences across offline and online environs, standardizing procedures across geographic regions and departments, and create dynamic workflows with the ability to respond to distinct customer needs.
Even though there are risks and challenges to the digital transformation matrix, the benefits for the organizations and the managers that implement the digital world are worth the effort.
As illustrated in recent research projects, the digital transformation maturity model will benefit the organization through enhancing people and process efficiencies, increasing profits, and creating new connections. The other benefits in this model include:
- Increasing collaboration across departments
- Enhancing the ability to meet the expectations of customers
- Increasing agility within IT to meet the requirements of businesses
- Improving competition in the market
- A high level of innovation in the business
- Making fast strategic decisions
- Increasing the growth of business
- Improving productivity across main sections
- Reducing business costs
- Reducing information technology costs
Disparate Processes, Knowledge, and Information
As the operations manager, with an in-depth understanding of the pros and cons of the digital transformation matrix, the next step has to be revisiting established and existing processes to determine your current opportunities and state for improvement.
This can be hindered in firms that do not have documented, shared, described, or stored processes. In such instances, the core knowledge of the processes will sit in minds of particular employees, while other info will be in the silos. The result of this will be businesses lacking standardization and visibility to value chains and end-to-end processes.
Collaborative Digital Transformation
As a manager, you need to put in place the right digital transformation initiatives if you want to record success. Adopting a collaborative approach when implementing the digital transformation maturity model will speed up workflow and knowledge sharing amongst colleagues, and create a fluid channel of communication. This approach will also address existing challenges and bring teams together with the existing processes, and follow up with a new approach for new processes. This approach will improve accountability among employees, managers, and highlight weak links in the initiative.
The tools of digital transformation need to support your efforts and give you a central platform to collaborate, create, reuse, publish, and manage processes, models, data, knowledge, documents, and methods that are crucial to these initiatives. Effortless creation and sharing of knowledge need to be a common aspect for digitally transformed businesses.
Once you have the ability to see the benefits of the digital transformation matrix, it is time to define a strategy that will maximize the opportunity and source the necessary tools and approach of implementing and driving change. Your organization will start accomplishing its goals and reap the rewards of the digital business transformation model.