Digital transformation success: 3 make-or-break factors

We’ve all seen how digital transformation has accelerated over the past few years, and is helping companies innovate, become more resilient, improve customer experience, and ultimately grow. However, according to Accenture, only 13% of companies have realized the full impact of their digital investments.

Why are so many companies struggling, and what are successful companies doing differently?

Even though several factors can impact the ability of an organization to reap the benefits of their investments in digital transformation, successful organizations do these three things:

1. Put people first
2. Connect the enterprise
3. Unleash innovation

The human element of digital transformation success

Often, the first thing that comes to mind when people think about digital transformation is technology. While technology is the enabler, companies also need to focus on their talent and make sure they’re ready to embrace the change.

If people aren’t on board, they’ll resist the change, impeding the success of any digital transformation effort.

Business leaders need to communicate a clear strategy and bring people together to reimagine their organization for growth. They must also instill a culture that rewards experimentation and a digital innovation mindset. Moreover, they need to train their people on how to capitalize on the opportunities for incorporating technology in their day-to-day work and how to drive process change and sustain it.

Last but not least, companies must ensure that the technology deployed is user-friendly and highly accessible. Otherwise, they put adoption at risk and won’t achieve the desired business outcomes.

For example, if a CRM or sales automation solution is cumbersome or difficult to use, sales professionals most likely will avoid using it. They want to spend their time selling instead of doing lots of data entry or figuring out a system that’s not delivering a tangible value for them.

A recent Harvard Business Review report shows that delivering effective and easy-to-use tools and technology is one of the key investment priorities for sales leaders over the next two years.

Connections drive true transformation 

Even though 87% of companies believe that cross-departmental collaboration is highly important, only 53% of companies can deliver this, according to Harvard Business Review research.

In their quest for digital transformation success, many companies are still trying to figure out how to break silos. Investing or having best-of-breed solutions isn’t enough; if the solutions can’t integrate seamlessly, it’s hard to achieve real gains from any transformation efforts.

Connecting the enterprise has become imperative in a digital-first and customer-centric world. By tying all systems together, companies can share data across departments such as finance, operations, sales, service, commerce, and marketing. With a single view of the customer, companies can better understand, engage, and serve each customer across different touch points.

In customer service, this could mean providing agents with access to information on orders, repairs, billing, shipping, and promotions. This would empower service teams to provide faster resolutions and even cross-sell.

For De’Longhi— one of the world’s leading players in small domestic appliances — having everything in one place enabled them to boost productivity, reduce query-handling time, and deliver smoother customer experiences.

A connected enterprise also increases collaboration, improves decision-making, and boosts efficiency and productivity. True end-to-end, integrated business processes allow companies to drive consistency across the organization, at scale.

Paving the way for innovation 

Companies that have realized digital transformation success empower their people to innovate and create unique solutions that address their specific needs. These organizations support business application development that uncovers ways to expand business models and offerings.

Organizations lagging behind in this area should embrace a highly composable solution based on API-first, microservices-based technology. With a low code-no code solution, a company can easily configure and build additional features to enhance standard capabilities.

This will allow them to democratize access to technology, extend their applications, create differentiated customer experiences, and quickly adapt to changing business needs and goals.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in recent years, it’s that change is constant, and those who can adapt, transform, or reinvent themselves quickly will not only survive, but thrive.

For example, more and more companies in the manufacturing industry are thinking beyond selling products and shifting to new business models based on proactive service and subscription-based pricing. With a microservices architecture, these organizations could create new applications to support this more quickly – increasing agility, generating new revenue streams, and reducing time to value.

Putting it all together

Technology investments don’t automatically generate successful digital transformations and produce high returns.

Examine your organization’s digital maturity and see how putting people first, connecting the enterprise, and unleashing innovation can help accelerate your digital transformation, improve customer experience, and drive growth.