Digitalization has been revealed as a very popular response to the current health and consequent economic crisis. In order to keep business rolling, we have been adapting to work from home policies, remote meetings and helpdesk enquiries. Even the most conservative businesses are being forced to evolve and modernize their internal workflows to adjust to this reality.
It seems that we are now progressively going back into our normal lives, however all of us are pretty aware of the high probability of a second wave of restrictions, once again disrupting all business activity. If we don’t want to be caught unprepared a second time, and merely adapt to the circumstances, we’d better take the lead in properly accelerating our digital transformation as soon as possible.
Start identifying your pain points and defining your goals
Thanks to this unique experience during the pandemic, you are likely to have plenty of information regarding processes, departments or informatic systems that were real pain points for your daily activity during the lockdown, thus urgently need to be digitized. By collecting feedback from your co-workers and analyzing the trend of your internal KPIs, you will be able to identify specific aspects that require improvements. This acknowledgment is the key to properly define the goals you need to achieve during your digital transformation.
Do not hesitate to build a detailed wishlist of the changes you want to complete and remember to consider the reasons for them to be seen as pain points, the limitations you may encounter and the dependencies between those different changes. This methodology will allow you to have a clearer idea of your current position and terms of digitalization and you’ll manage to establish priorities and phases among your goals.
As a result, it will also clarify what kind of technology you are looking for, thus which vendor you need to contact.
Let’s face it, this is far from being a one-(wo)man job.
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Enlist all stakeholders from day one
Any technological feature has to serve a specific purpose and benefit a predetermined audience. Not every improvement can be global, but all of its beneficiaries should take part of the process from day one, in order to properly design the solution they need. This means that any digital transformation can be led from one department, or even by the hand of one single — and very busy — person, however the chosen one(s) must coordinate all the stakeholders from the very beginning of the initiative. Depending on the nature of the improvement, you might need to count on your Human Resources department for example, or your german-speaking employees or your externalized contact center provider. While you make sure that everyone is aligned and agrees on a common goal, they will feel taken into account and useful, which ensures you that they will be eager to adopt this new technology you are defining together.
Far from being an anecdote, technology adoption is actually the key indicator of the success of your digital transformation. Evolving your business activity only makes sense if your employees indeed take advantage of it, that is if you manage to make their life easier and encourage their productivity.
It is never too early to involve IT, Security & Compliance
When it comes to technological innovation, it is never too early to involve your IT, Security and Compliance departments. They have the power to authorize or stop an initiative and they have the responsibility to guarantee that your approach regarding digital improvements fulfills the company’s policies. They can help in validating the bigger picture but also ask some tricky questions about the technical architecture you are considering to implement. Some of the usual concerns bear upon SaaS licencing versus on-premise installation, VPN traffic versus https protocol, or hosting and maintenance of middleware, webhooks and so-on. Another variable to pay attention to is the availability of internal and specialized resources to help implement these improvements. No need to underline that when it comes to being fast and efficient in digitalizing the company, some of those topics can determine the viability of an initiative. For example, if you pretend to adopt a tool for targeted notification integrated with your CRM, but you must have an on-premise set up and no internal resources are available, this initiative might be barely viable.
Once you get acknowledged with the rules and restrictions you have to follow, it is time to figure out the model of technological advances you can integrate and try to stick to it as much as possible. Consistency is agile, exceptions are painful.
Build your own tailor-made framework and make it grow
At this stage you’re already aware of the different aspects you want to digitalize, the vendors that can help you in the process as well as the IT and Security models that fit your internal policies. Your focus now has to fall on building your own framework of applications.
Think about it as your tailor-made net of technological functionalities, that must individually complete a specific purpose and may also interact between each other. Try to apply this system to as many features as possible.
For instance, do not waste your resources building an internal application for employees to search and request training, if you can integrate a turnkey chatbot fed with the information and on the top of that prepared to understand natural language and offer a conversational user experience.
Besides the agility of replicating the same architectural set up to all the components of your digital transformation, designing your own framework also allows you to add or remove pieces of the puzzle based on your needs. It keeps you independent from the vendors you choose to work with at first and gives you plenty of room to include further improvements.
The big picture of your digitalization process consists in a multi-pieces puzzle that can elastically grow or contract to the rhythm of your company’s needs and possibilities.