Implementing Digital Transformation for Companies
Digital transformation is imperative for all businesses, from the small to the enterprise. That message comes through loud and clear from seemingly every keynote, panel discussion, article, or study related to how businesses can remain competitive and relevant as the world becomes increasingly digital. What's not clear to many business leaders is what digital transformation means. It's also a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure. In particular, digital transformation requires a foundational change in how companies use specific technology, processes and personnel. It promises to go a long way toward improving business performance while increasing value for customers and revenue for organizations. In the new era of "digital Darwinism," companies must now survive and compete by digitally transforming themselves in order to vastly improve their business processes and systems as well as substantially reduce business risk and costs.
Companies across industry have developed and adopted strategies to enable their digital transformation, some more effectively than others. As advanced technologies become more accessible and widespread, facilitated by decreasing prices and the prevalence and reliability of high-speed internet, businesses have rapidly adapted or have fallen behind. Understanding failure is imperative to bring about future success. When it comes to digital transformation projects, failure is not hard to find. Somewhere between 65-percent and 85-percent of attempts fail, leading to substantial loss of time, money, and effort. Contributing significantly to this high failure rate is the disconnect many businesses experience between their strategy and implementation. While related, these two concepts are separate projects.
Today, however, software is created using agile methods. In the digital age of big data and cloud computing, it comes out as "releases" every one to three months, and development cycles happen in one-week or two-week sprints. The result is a minimum viable product as opposed to that near-perfect digital platform that might take years to deploy. To say the least, it has been a philosophical shift. Agile development has sped up and improved the latest digital technologies. With increasing frequency, software or systems are released along with updates or changes based on customers' wants and needs. What's more, its quick implementation allows for major improvements while users ponder their own use case.