Digital transformation benefits organizations with increased operational efficiency, a faster time to market, and the ability to meet changing customer expectations. But 70 percent of complex and large-scale change programs fail to achieve their desired goals. For digital transformation to succeed, organizations need to start with the end in mind: a clear, pre-defined goal that every department and employee can work toward together.
If you can successfully accelerate your organization’s digital transformation, you can secure a competitive edge—and a great way to achieve this? Collaboration software that enables rapid communication and shared access to important resources and data.
Let’s look at how to accelerate your company’s digital transformation using a collaboration software.
1. Analyze your existing processes and tech
Before you commit to moving forward with a digital transformation plan, it’s important to take stock of your current standing. By conducting an objective analysis of your organization’s current strengths and weaknesses, you can start to lay the foundation for an in-depth digital transformation that builds upon what’s working well—and, just as importantly, replaces what’s not.
A thorough review of your company’s processes should include feedback from employees and customers, with the greater goal of determining how and where digital transformation is necessary.
During your review, be sure to look for:
- Process and technological bottlenecks. What processes or tools are causing delays further along in your workflows?
- Breakdowns in internal communications. Are different teams capable of collaborating well? Do they possess the tools they need to ensure they’re on the same page with equal access to necessary data, documentation, and information?
- Lackluster or outdated software and tools. Is your currently available software continuing to meet your demands? Does your current tech necessitate clunky workarounds to adequately assist your employees?
- Tasks that can be automated. Are employees spending too much time on necessary, but unproductive and menial, tasks? Can automating these tasks increase productivity elsewhere or avoid the potential pitfalls of human-made errors?
In other words, figuring out how to accelerate your company’s digital transformation using a collaboration software requires you to first identify problem areas. From there, you can implement techniques and tools to resolve them—like an intranet or knowledge management platform.
2. Outline your digital transformation strategy
Digital transformation isn’t just a bandage that resolves underlying organizational issues: it’s a total and complete overhaul of your approach that can, in some cases, require a shift in mindset.
This means you need to identify the type or types of transformation your organization requires. For example:
- Process transformation focuses on improving your internal processes and operations using analytics, metrics, machine learning, AI, and other digital tools.
- Business model transformation changes your organizational structure and business model at a foundational level.
- Domain transformation alters the structure of your website and online footprint.
- Organizational structure prioritizes learning and using technical skills across your entire organization to improve workflows, cohesion, and data collection and measurement.
Once you’ve identified how your business needs to transform, you can outline a digital-centric strategy (including relevant metrics and KPIs) that will take you from where you are to where you want to be.
When outlining your digital transformation strategy, make sure to allow for flexibility and growth throughout the process. Trying out new digital tech can introduce different concerns and issues—or even prompt mistakes among your employees. For example, less tech-savvy employees may take more time to adapt to a new software, which may increase mistakes and/or lower productivity while they learn their way around the new tool. Or, if employees are used to existing manual processes, it may take some time to get them to fully transition to new digital processes—as old habits can be hard to shake. These “growing pains” need to be embraced as part of your strategy; they can reveal addition al areas that your organization overlooked in the initial analysis stage and present opportunities for learning experiences that further improve your processes.
And because successful digital transformation requires everyone to work together, make sure everyone has access to resources that support achieving your goals. Use collaboration software to ensure accurate and up-to-date data and information is accessible to everyone involved in the process and to enable employees to discuss changes and concerns. This can ensure employees are on board with the transformation and provides the flexibility to improve or adapt your strategy based on different demands and needs.
To remain laser-focused on your digital transformation goals, you need to align yourself with partners that enable your organization to achieve those goals. This means finding vendors that share your organization’s values and understand your specific needs.
But how?
Create a digital ecosystem or network of vendors that will work with you to implement your strategy. Look for partners that are similarly innovative and disruptive. The perfect digital transformation partner should:
- Offer a customized plan and solution based on the unique needs of your organization and its workforce
- Clearly define your goals and a path to achieving them
- Provide an exit strategy that includes training and self-sufficiency throughout—and after—the digital transformation process
Collaboration software can help you accelerate your company’s digital transformation by ensuring partners and vendors can work with you and one another to embrace interoperability. This can, in turn, cut down on future “growing pains” and ensure compatibility across departments and workflows.
At Talkspirit, our Customer Success Team is on hand to help with digital transformation. We provide support from the beginning, helping our client’s set themselves up for a successful launch, whether they’re launching as a collaborative work platform, an internal social network, or a company intranet (or all three!)—and continue to provide one-on-one support and helpful resources throughout the implementation of a project to ensure deployment and adoption goes as planned.
4. …And include your employees in the process
One of the most effective resources to accelerate your company’s digital transformation using a collaboration software? Your existing workforce ! Though your employees need to adjust to using new digital tools and changing workflows, they can also play a significant role earlier on in the digital transformation process—as long as you involve them and generate buy-in.
But how?
Including your employees in every stage of digital transformation—from the start and up to (and past) implementation—gives your organization valuable insight into its impact. What’s that look like?
- Employees exemplify the use cases of digital tech. Ultimately, your employees are the ones that are going to be the most impacted by your digital transformations. A successful digital transformation can streamline processes and improve productivity; ineffective transformation can introduce new complications and decrease productivity and morale. Understanding your employees’ needs and preferences helps your digital transformation strategy achieve its goals, so conduct surveys, host meetings, and provide forums in which employees are free to share their thoughts, concerns, and suggestions about what needs to change and what should remain the same.
- Successful digital transformation requires employee buy-in. Clunky new tools and inefficient workflows can hamper productivity and negatively impact your company culture. Promoting employee buy-in can encourage engagement with the entire digital transformation process, making your workforce more eager and invested in the new tools and workflows that will be available to them. It can also prompt them to suggest new and more efficient approaches that can increase productivity and mitigate the need for workarounds. Convert the most vocal supporters into champions of your digital transformation to create a liaison between your workforce and those responsible for implementing these changes.
- IT needs to champion digital transformation. The bulk—if not all—of the responsibility for implementing digital transformation falls to IT. Your CIO needs to work with IT and other partners to keep everyone current on key business drivers as they relate to accelerating digital transformation.
- Training needs to remain a consistent priority. Ongoing training is necessary for ensuring IT is capable of supporting new tools and tech, but that’s not enough. End users need to be kept in the loop too, which means resources need to be allocated to bring everyone up to speed throughout the process.
Clearly, including your employees in your digital transformation is important, but how, exactly, do you do that?
Collaboration software can serve as a central repository of information and guidance throughout digital transformation in a variety of watts, including:
- Management can host webinars to explain why digital transformation is necessary and how that process looks
- Vendors and IT staff can work together to compile documentation and helpful training materials for employees to access and reference in a single location
- Employees can provide real-time feedback and suggestions that streamline adoption
The idea is that all parties are heard and feedback collated to ensure your digital transformation is comprehensive, efficient, and useful in real-world applications.
Accelerate your organization’s digital transformation using a collaboration software
Successful digital transformation is a highly involved and complex process that requires buy-in from across your organization. It also necessitates close and ongoing communication with the employees, partners, and vendors responsible for implementing your strategy and modernizing your technology.
A powerful all-in-one collaborative platform like Talkspirit has all the features you need to accelerate and support your organization’s digital transformation—including video conferencing, webinars, project management, and checklists, as well as knowledge management and a shared drive to provide access to up-to-date data and information across departments and teams.
Interested in learning more about Talkspirit and how to accelerate your company’s digital transformation using a collaborative software?
