Digital transformation: Turning vision into action
In today’s digital-first world where technology is evolving on a daily basis, digital transformation is a key ingredient to organizational success. Undergoing digital transformation will help your company adapt to this rapidly changing environment, stay competitive, and meet customer expectations.
Digital transformation works from the inside out
Digital transformation refers to the process of integrating digital technologies into all areas of the business, making ways of working more efficient and effective. It’s not about building an entirely new digital product suite on top of your existing offering. Instead, it focuses on transforming the way your company operates. By utilizing digital tools and information to make processes more straightforward and efficient, you can offer better experiences for your customers, faster.
The importance of digital transformation
Prioritizing digital opportunities within your business allows for scalability and flexibility. As we’ve seen, an organization’s ability to quickly adapt to supply chain issues, changing customer expectations, and time to market pressures make the difference between success and failure. The stakes have never been higher.
But these changes have been a long time coming. As Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research, wrote: “The top IT executives in today’s rapidly evolving organizations must match the pace of change, fall behind, or lead the pack. That’s the existential issue at stake in today’s digitally-infused times, where bold action must be actively supported by out-of-the-box experimentation and pathfinding. This must be done while managing the inexorable daily drumbeat of operational issues, service delivery, and the distracting vagaries of the unpredictable, such as a major cyberattack or information breach.”
Hinchcliffe goes on to say that a seamless customer experience is “the most important discriminating factor for how a business will perform.”
Developing a digital transformation strategy
While the specifics of digital transformation will look different across organizations, there are four constants that leadership should consider when putting together a digital transformation strategy.
- Org Transformation
Having your organization rally around a customer-centric approach is one thing; instituting the operational and process change to accomplish it is another. Digital transformation isn’t a one-and-done, and everyone needs to buy in to make changes that last.
2. Waterfall-to-Agile
Move away from big releases and embrace continuous improvement. This process empowers you to correct customer pain points and release features that meet established needs—while looking ahead for market opportunities.
3. Human-Centered Approach
By setting up effective user feedback loops, you can pair data with business objectives to establish a multi-year roadmap based on evidence, not guesswork.
4. Adopt and Integrate Emergent Technologies
Data should be independent of your platforms to evolve existing systems and incorporate emerging technologies that align with positive customer experiences. Your teams should be trained to evolve your technology over time to align with your company’s strategy.
The role of UX in digital transformation
Digital products and services should be designed with a focus on human needs and experiences. The user’s experience (UX) is a non-negotiable consideration in digital transformation. Working this way ensures you’re building features, content, and functionality that people want and need.
Research centers the user experience as you work and is an ongoing, iterative process crucial to successful digital transformation. Understanding your users, being thoughtful about the things you’re designing for them, allowing your customers to have input into the process and letting their needs drive the innovation; building a culture of learning and collaboration that leads to better experiences for users and better business outcomes.
When researching, your team needs to answer two crucial questions:
- Who are our users?
- What problem does our application, product, or feature solve for them?
Implementing digital transformation across your organization
As daunting as the name may sound, you don’t have to start with an enormous overhaul when you’re thinking about implementing a digital transformation strategy. You can start small. Implementing a focused digital change in your processes can garner results that can fuel more extensive organizational changes.
Understand where you are now. Get the lay of the land and then decide what you want to build. Explore facets of your service design to understand your end-to-end process. Map your customer’s journey, how they interact with your business at various stages of the customer lifecycle, examine your digital (and non-digital) touchpoints to find sources of friction with your customers.
Where are the pain points and issues that tell you where to go and what to transform?
Digital transformation: A real world example
Our client, an enterprise telecommunications company, came to us for help reimagining the way they used their internal tools. They realized that their current ways of working couldn’t sustain their rapidly changing business or address the growing needs of their customers.
We conducted user research to understand the issues with the current toolset and collaborated with tech and design experts to design a unified application that would support employees in delivering personalized sales and seamless customer service.
This project wasn’t just about design—it was large-scale digital transformation. Beyond unifying internal tools, we worked to bring together previously siloed teams and create the organizational structures needed to scale design, product, and development efforts effectively. We helped our client establish processes that fostered collaboration and streamlined workflows. At the same time, our embedded teams delivered high quality education, design, and front-end development, ensuring both the strategy and execution were aligned.
To support the transition to the newly optimized platform, we developed strategic messaging that acknowledged employees’ daily challenges and goals and highlighted how the new tool would help streamline workflows, boost employee efficiency, and transform the customer service experience.
Beyond just technology adoption, digital transformation requires a shift in organizational culture to embrace innovation and agility. Thoughtful education and messaging helps demonstrate the impact of digital transformation, making adoption smoother and driving long-term organizational change.
In it for the long haul
For the past 5 years, Think Company has been deeply embedded within this client’s organization, demonstrating our commitment to long-term partnership and sustained impact. We won’t simply deliver recommendations and walk away—we work side by side with our clients, contributing to the hard work of execution and ensuring that transformation efforts are not only envisioned but successfully realized.
The digital transformation business case
Digital transformation makes your organization more efficient and effective. By transforming from the inside out and utilizing digital tools and information, you can offer better experiences to your customers. It’s a process that builds over time and makes your organization more dynamic and ultimately more effective.
Want to see how Think Company can help with digital transformation management and create lasting, scalable solutions? Let’s connect.
