Five Best Practices to Digitally Transform Your Business
More enterprises are taking the digital plunge as they realize the urgency behind digital transformation.
- By Anurag Shah
- October 13, 2022
The rules of the game have changed -- digital is the one and only way to grow, sustain, and futureproof your business. Today digital transformation is a key business goal across organizations, and many have already made significant headway.
Although there are many reasons for businesses to undertake their digital journeys, the primary drivers are:
- Rising customer expectations
- The need for faster business processes
- Intensifying competition
In addition to these factors, the pandemic compelled businesses to build resiliency and embrace change. Per a recent Newgen research report on digital transformation, 100 percent of enterprises are now engaged with digital transformation in some way, but most (77 percent) only began this journey within the past two years.
Creating a Comprehensive Digital Transformation Strategy
Investing in digital transformation is critical, but the execution can become complex. This complexity compounds rapidly when your people, systems, and strategies are not working in sync. To achieve your digital transformation goals, you must follow a comprehensive strategy that helps you transform end-to-end business processes, eliminate siloes, and embrace agility.
Here are five best practices that can help you modernize, accelerate, and digitally transform your business.
Best Practice #1: Ensure end-to-end automation of applications
Most business processes rely on complex applications spanning systems. Because process modernization lies at the heart of digital transformation, these applications are critical for your transformational initiatives. However, organizations can often get stuck in their digital journeys due to siloed automation -- only enhancing applications in bits and pieces.
According to the Newgen report, "Top-tier enterprises [those with better digital outcomes] are more than seven times more likely to be digitally transforming end-to-end than bottom-tier enterprises (80 percent versus 11 percent)." To ensure an end-to-end digital transformation, you must focus on achieving end-to-end automation of your business-critical applications.
Best Practice #2: Integrate digital with core business systems
Your organization hinges on numerous business-critical systems that underwent many upgrades and modifications over time. As these systems are reliable and vital to your business, you must include them in your digital transformation strategy. Integrating digital with core systems can revamp your operational infrastructure while leveraging the capabilities nurtured throughout your business journey.
Best Practice #3: Put top-notch customer engagement at the top of your priority list
Customer experience is the most common goal of digital transformation initiatives. However, most initiatives have only focused on streamlining complex business processes and managing business information.
Digital transformation is more than that; customer engagement transformation is central to these initiatives. You must adopt modern technologies such as cloud and mobile and ensure multichannel customer engagement at every step of the customer journey.
Best Practice #4: Leverage intelligent technologies for insights
Even though content is said to be the “new oil,” you must be able to extract the real value from it -- insights. To deliver an “Amazon-like” experience, you must adopt intelligent technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable better analysis and generate insights. These capabilities will aid you in unstructured information management, content-driven workflows, contextual content, records management, social sensing, and more.
Best Practice #5: Adopt a comprehensive digital transformation platform
Applications are integral to digital transformation but finding or building applications that suit your unique business needs can be a mammoth task. Investing in a digital transformation platform can provide prebuilt business applications that can be quickly customized according to requirements. This will also ensure on-demand scaling with a faster go-to-market.
In addition, look for a platform with AI and ML, robotic process automation, and low-code capabilities that can help you transform your business complexities. According to the Newgen report, "Top-tier enterprises are nearly five times as likely to be engaged with low code [tools] (63 percent versus 13 percent)."
Tapping the Unrealized Potential
More enterprises are taking the digital plunge as they realize the urgency behind digitalization. The Newgen report shows that the top-tier enterprises are more than 2.4 times as likely to say digital transformation is extremely important (76 percent versus 32 percent).
To successfully thrive in the face of rising expectations, business speed, and growing competition, you must equip your business with the right tools and technologies that help you transform. A well-formed digital transformation strategy allows you to create new business opportunities while shedding light on existing ones buried under your enterprise's unrealized potential.
About the Author
Anurag Shah heads Newgen’s Products and Solutions Division in the Americas. He has been with Newgen for over 22 years. In his previous role, he led and managed delivery and professional services for enterprise customers. You can reach the author via email and LinkedIn.
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