What is Digital Transformation and How Can It Accelerate the Success of Your Business?
There are two ways to look at business innovations driven by technology. One is to look at it as a disruption that causes nothing but a headache. The other is to look at it as a new exciting opportunity for you and your company to pursue.
It appears that over 70% of companies favor the second over the first approach as they embrace digital transformation as the only way to move forward.
Today we will explain what digital transformation is, go into the details of how to build a data pipeline, and discover how it can boost your business.
Digital Transformation: A Quick Recap
Digital transformation encompasses various actions and processes that share one goal in common – streamline integration of digital technologies into all areas of one company to facilitate improving, optimizing, and often re-inventing business processes. Digital transformation translates into abandoning obsolete work methodologies and tools and embracing and implementing emerging tech solutions.
Digital transformation defies the status quo, which became a paradigm across verticals. It helps companies understand the value and risks associated with the implementation of new digital solutions.
Digital transformation is not something that is imposed but simply required by the changes in the world’s markets and customer behaviors, needs, wants, and expectations. The primary goal of a digital transformation is to help better position a business, improve business processes, transform culture, and optimize the customer experience.
While we are at it, we have to mention that digital transformation is often interchangeably used with digitization and digitalization. This is a common mistake as all these three terms refer to different things. Digitization refers to the process of converting paper records to digital files. On the other hand, digitalization refers to identifying more efficient ways to do business with no impact on the process, such as using CRM software to instantly access customer profiles.
Finally, we have digital transformation as a process that changes the very nature of how you do business. For instance, it can encompass re-considering data collection practices and building a new data pipeline to enable better decision-making at every step, increase efficiency, and leverage personalization to deliver a delightful customer experience.
Digital transformation is a profound process. One that really challenges the status quo and makes you think about how you can truly transform your business processes to align your company better with its goals, mission, and vision.
Now, since you understand what a digital transformation is, let’s see how it can boost your business.
6 Ways Digital Transformation Boosts Your Business
When you see a statistic just like the one we shared with you at the very beginning, it does make you wonder – why are so many companies out there embracing digital transformation? Before you can say no to the status quo and transform the business processes, you need to understand the value of digital transformation. Here are six ways digital transformation can boost your business.
Optimized Revenue Streams & More Profit
We’ve intentionally brought up revenue and profit as a first benefit because many business owners and managers worry about it. Digital transformation is a huge step. For some, it is even a leap of faith, and worrying about the profit is entirely reasonable. The encouraging data comes from one of the latest reports regarding digital transformation and profitability.
Leaders of companies with a digital transformation strategy in place expect to generate 23% higher revenue than their competitors.
Companies that are adopting digital transformation report that they have 85% market share growth. Additionally, 80% of companies that completed such a transformation report increased profits.
Better Data Collection
One of the main goals of every digital transformation process is how to build a data pipeline. But what are data pipelines to begin with? A data pipeline is software that streamlines data collection, processing, and analysis. It creates an automated data flow while taking care of all data-related processes ranging from extracting and transforming to validating and making it ready for visualization.
Data transformation will help you create a system unique to your business model and help you collect and analyze the data. This unlocks the new levels of business intelligence as it provides actionable insights into business opportunities, operations, finance, and customer journey.
Improved Collaboration
Efficient and streamlined collaboration is the ultimate goal for many companies. However, it is something that is hard to achieve. Every department has its own set of favorite tools. Digital transformation enables organizations to plan and structure collaboration so that everyone is on board.
Since companies start from scratch, this is an excellent opportunity to identify the right tools to facilitate intra- and inter-departmental collaboration. With access to the right tools and all data touchpoints, companies will improve collaboration and plant a seed for digital culture.
Benefiting from digital transformation requires new skills and knowledge, and inspiring staff to continually learn and develop is essential for success nowadays.
Improved Asset and Resource Management
To truly be a data-driven organization, a company has to manage its assets and resources in one place. Having data scattered all over the place, both in the cloud and on-premises, and using hundreds of different software solutions is a considerable challenge. It makes efficient asset and resource management virtually impossible.
Digital transformation can change this for good. Since it targets every business area, it can help companies centralize their operations, discover bottlenecks, and implement innovative solutions. Instant access to information and open communication channels leads to better resource management and greater efficiency overall.
Improved Customer Experience
The latest Gartner report reveals that over 66% of companies actively compete to deliver a better customer experience. The projections tell us that this number will go up to 80% in the near future. We are definitely living in the customer-centric era. It simply means that companies need to deliver a better customer experience than their competitors.
Digital transformation can help companies build data pipelines to collect and analyze customer data. The customer insights will prove vital in winning the customer experience competition. It particularly excels at enabling companies to collect both structured and unstructured customer data and give it meaning.
Business Future-proofing
Speed-to-market is a go-to metric for many business analysts. It tells how long it takes to turn a product idea into product customers can buy and use. Modern consumers are changing along with the markets, which are becoming oversaturated and volatile. Being able to identify a market opportunity and quickly pursue it is going to become even more critical in the future.
Digital transformation can help companies do exactly that. Because it transforms a business on so many levels, digital transformation helps companies become more agile. More importantly, it doesn’t establish a new status quo. It does quite the opposite – it leaves the door open for innovation, improvement, and adaptation.
The current statistics and developments across the industry make it logical to assume that digital transformation became an imperative for businesses in different industries. It enables businesses to re-visit their process and practices and use cutting-edge technologies to restructure and innovate them. It appears that building the data pipelines, running a data-driven operation, and relying on a central repository for business intelligence are essential for succeeding in modern markets. Is your enterprise considering or undergoing a digital transformation? Find out how Pandio supports digital transformations through data abstraction, connectivity, and orchestration here.