Digital transformation is a must in order to adapt to the new era. Yet, data from McKinsey suggests that some 70% of all digital transformation programs fail. How can you ensure that your digital transformation succeeds?
Digital Transformation Goes Beyond Technological Adoption
Digital transformation isn’t just about adopting new software, technologies, and processes; it’s about a whole new way of thinking. Digital transformation challenges require transformation and alignment not just of businesses models and employees, but also of the stakeholders associated with the brand.
To be truly successful, organisations need to rethink every area of their business, as shown on the graphic below. They need to consider transformation challenges in 2022 and take into account the global exchange of cloud resources, in order to tackle issues as varied as employment challenges in the digital era to business strategy concerns.
As Gartner’s digital transformation strategy advises, from performance management to reimagining customer interactions to infrastructure investment and alignment with overall business goals, digital transformation needs to be executed with extreme care and diligence.
In other words, while there is no sure fire way to ensure success, thoroughly understanding and preparing the scope of the challenge is a good way to start, and immediately boosts your chance of achieving your goals with digital strategies for next-generation enterprise.
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5 Key Challenges to Digital Transformation
Let’s look at five key challenges to digital transformation. The following can be used as a business strategy cheat sheet :
- Organisational culture
At its heart, digital transformation is about your organisation’s ability to adapt to change. No matter how robust digital transformation strategy is, if you don’t get employee buy-in, it’s not going to succeed.
In order to get everyone on board, it’s important to actively communicate why digital transformation is necessary, how it will be implemented, and how it will improve business outcomes for the company. To make it even easier for employees, many companies approach their digital transformation as a product that they need to sell internally, and brand it accordingly.
- Lack of clarity on the digital transformation budget
To drive digital transformation, an organisation needs to invest in acquiring the right technology and the right digital experience team to execute it. It’s important to budget adequate resources as cutting corners now can result in sub-optimal transformation or even failure.
To do so, we suggest involving representatives from all affected departments and getting input on the resources needed, and setting a flexible budgeting model as you may need to reallocate resources as different challenges crop up. In addition, it is essential to train your staff to ensure a successful digital transformation of your company. So, consider allocating a separate budget for training programs.
- Investing in adequate IT resources and management
Poor resource management planning and lack of IT resources are some of the critical challenges related to digital transformation. Management needs to commit to investing and retaining as much digital talent as needed by the strategic digital transformation plan, accompanies by investment in IT infrastructure and software. Given the war for qualified IT talent, this is easier said than done, and sufficient time should be allocated to building up the recruitment pipeline.
- Digital security
Digital security is a critical piece of digital transformation strategy. Security should be embedded into all applications as the first line of defence, across all of the different internal, public, and cloud environments in use. Deploying an end-to-end, policy-driven security approach is important to better secure every aspect of the value chain. At the same time, security protocols should not be so onerous as to pose and obstacle to connection and collaboration.
- Emphasising agile transformation
A study from Global State of Enterprise Agile in 2021 revealed that 68% of companies identified agility as one of their most important initiatives for a successful digital transformation. Being agile means responsive to change, learning from failures, and constantly improving on execution. In practice this means emphasising:
- Agile systems : for example, leveraging micro-services and open APIs to ensure that you have flexible, extensible architecture able to handle diverse technologies while reducing costs at the same time.
- Agile teams : establishing teams that can flexibility adjust to handle different workloads. For example, by establishing teams in different geographic areas, firms can leverage different time zones to accelerate development cycles.
- Agile processes : set up for continuous release and delivery, with a dedicated release management function supported by ongoing management, verification, and communication.
In doing so, it’s important to ensure that employees have the tools and connectivity they need to remain connected, engaged, with rich collaboration to support deeper engagement.
The above applies to enterprises across the board, from finance and ICT companies to conventional companies like manufacturing and construction companies’ business strategy.
How Telin Can Help You Survive And Thrive Throughout Your Digital Transformation
With our current vision to become Asia’s leading digital infrastructure & platform partner, Telin has come with up with 2 big missions, namely to enable our customers and partners to create value from the digital economy through world-class international connectivity and platform solutions, and to build Indonesia as a leading interconnection hub for the Indo-Pacific region and a partner of choice for Carriers, Hyperscalers and Global Enterprises.
At the same time, Telin’s commitment to “Accelerate Your Digital Expansion in the Indo-Pacific Region” reflects our commitment to give our customers access to digital connectivity, digital platform and specialised digital services, thus enabling customers and operators to evolve beyond network connectivity and value-added services as the industry shifts to compete on over-the-top (OTT) offerings.
Digital transformation challenges are complex to handle. Drawing on our extensive experience and comprehensive portfolio of solutions, our team can help you refine your transformation roadmap by proposing time and cost-saving digital solutions that can deliver real value both to your organisation, your people and your customers.
If you’re interested in learning more about Telin’s solutions, visit telin.net or email us at marketing@telin.net and we can chat about how best to move your business forward. Stay safe, stay healthy, and stay connected!