As digital technologies radically reshape industries, many organizations are pursuing large-scale change efforts to realize the benefits of these trends or simply keep up with potential competitors. In the process, a wide range of companies have undertaken such efforts to drive their business in the current digital age. Yet success in these transformations is proving to be elusive. According to research by Bain and Company, 95 percent of digital transformations fail to achieve or exceed expectations.
Why are so many companies unable to successfully transform in the digital age and how can they drive transformation the right way?
Companies must rethink their strategy and implement technologies that can deliver the desired outcomes and ride the transformation wave. By doing so, they can easily meet the emerging demands of customers and provide the value they’ve been promised, ultimately accelerating revenue and becoming easier to do business with. Here are three ways business leaders can help their companies kickstart transformations:
1. Establish a Resilient Culture
It’s a human instinct to resist change. When a company ignores the cultural aspect of a digital transformation, it’ll start hitting the walls of resistance fairly quickly. Bringing business users at the forefront is key to kickstarting transformations. Not only does that reduces the burden on IT but also encourage customers to stay engaged with the business. While business users handle the data-driven operations, IT can focus on driving strategic tasks – thus enabling businesses to digitally transform at speed and scale.
2. Empower Business Users through Self-service
Companies that still rely on legacy data integration solutions have their IT teams up and ready to create data connections and integrate new customers. However, that takes a lot of time, sometimes between six to 12 weeks. Meanwhile, customers wait to get onboarded and integrated with the business. This increases frustration and agony in customers, and so companies find it difficult to create new revenue channels for the business.
By leveraging self-service integration solutions, companies empower their non-technical business users to create customer data connections in minutes while freeing IT to focus on more strategic tasks. As business users connect with customers faster, they can address their changing needs and deliver accordingly.
3. Rely on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
The quality of data insights determines the quality of decision-making in any company. And if decisions are right, riding the digital transformation wave is easier. AI and ML-powered technologies play a major role here.
Using AI and ML-powered technologies enable business users to map complex, bi-directional data in minutes, speeding insights delivery and ultimately decision-making. They can create customer onboarding connections by pointing and clicking through easy screens. At the same time, IT can take up the role of governance and focus on transformation-driven tasks instead.
In short, business leaders can use these three ways to address the changing needs of customers and ride the wave of digital transformation with ease and precision.