Every organization – big or small – has embraced digital transformation to better react, predict, and adapt to the new reality. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” After the pandemic in 2020, organizations that were just thinking of digital transformation made it the top-most priority, and the organizations that had started the journey accelerated the pace.
Process transformation, re-engineering, and integrating business processes for increasing operating efficiency and effectiveness, is an essential part of digital transformation. But without complete visibility into their processes, many organizations have reached a plateau. To overcome the adversities of the pandemic, several companies rushed robotic process automation (RPA) initiatives in a sense of panic and urgency. Most of the organizations skipped important steps in the transformation planning and adoption, leading to band-aid fixes and short-term benefits.
Here are seven steps you need to follow to build a strong base for the pandemic-accelerated transformation and successfully scale transformation initiatives:
- Obtain executive sponsorship: Digital transformation is an enterprise-wide program and requires buy-in from leaders and executives to secure funding for ongoing and future transformation programs. This helps to procure the right resources and gather the right teams. Creating awareness in the early stages helps to build confidence in senior stakeholders right from the first step.
- Select the right vendors: Digital transformation is a long-term program and requires strong partnership from the vendors you choose. You need to select an enterprise-ready process discovery platform to get a comprehensive view across process automation and optimization opportunities. Automated business process discovery provides unbiased insights into end-to-end processes including documentation and analysis.
- Secure IT buy-in: IT plays a crucial role in any digital transformation program. IT teams help to address any data security and privacy concerns such as capturing and storing system logs and desktop recordings. The team also evaluates infrastructure requirements for implementation for current and future implementation during the entire journey. Without IT buy-in, implementation could hit potential roadblocks and delay the value of benefits realization.
- Consolidate multiple change programs: A comprehensive transformation program considers digitization, re-engineering, and automation. So, it’s important that you bring together different teams working on each of the transformation initiatives together in sync to achieve a common goal.
- Set up a cross-functional CoE: Departmental silos reduce the efficiency and RoI of change programs. A Center of Excellence (CoE) plays a vital role in aligning common goals and bringing different teams together on the same page to enable smooth implementation of transformation projects. The CoE is responsible for establishing governance mechanisms to track progress and RoI, and roll out necessary communication plans.
- Securing the right expertise: As organizations adopt new technologies to support their transformation initiatives they need resources with the required skills and expertise to take the projects to success. The firms can hire new experts to train and upskill the available resources to maximize returns. There are service providers to provide initial implementation support and training to kick start the projects and keep them on track.
- Establish effective communication: Proper communication and change management are vital to ensure that process transformation initiatives are rolled out as planned. You need process experts to evangelize the programs and create firm-wide awareness of potential benefits. Involving operational SMEs and empowering them to play a role in adoption can help increase engagement and better manage change.
If you’re looking for help to kick start or accelerate your digital transformation program, SurfaceAI can be your valuable partner. Contact us today.