Digital Transformation, are you transforming?

23 July 2020

More than half of UK businesses have decided to transform their operations and offering through new business models and digitally enabled products and services. However, in practice,  the level of digital knowledge, planning and therefore maturity is highly variable across sectors and within individual businesses.

For many businesses digital transformation is achieved in two phases. Initially through digital business improvement: automating and transforming existing business processes with the use of digital technologies and then focusing on digital business innovation, creating new digitally enabled products, services and platforms to drive revenue and open new markets.

A common challenge for any business leader is to separate the “hype” and “buzz words”  from what is achievable for their specific business, so that they can quickly deliver identifiable “wins” and therefore build business confidence for future digital changes.

And this is exactly where a business consultant / coach delivers value and benefit to the business; by removing confusion and providing sound expert advice.

Many successful and established businesses are burdened by manual processes and poor data access. Unfortunately, especially when the new “normal” lends operation to being more remote, this tends to result in the need for a substantial, expensive and inefficient back-office admin functions. 

Successful digital transformation projects and plans focus on data flows and deploy the latest cloud and mobile technologies to develop smart applications with real-time access via web-services and APIs, centrally holding secure cloud data that is integrated with existing legacy, “on premise” systems.

Well derived digital business systems optimises the remote worker experience allowing more real-time data from customer to remote worker, to back office, improving business agility, offering better customer service and higher net profit. It also eliminates back office manual processes, improving data accuracy and delivering a short-term payback through head count savings or FTE reallocation.

Managing data using modern cloud platforms makes it possible to gather data at scale, at low cost, compared with traditional data warehousing platforms. It also offers better control on security and access and frees it from legacy silos. Businesses can analyse and use this intelligence to make faster and more accurate decisions, or offer more comprehensive data, results or insights for customers. As clients become more digitally mature we see them launch new premium digital service offerings, complementing more efficient operations with the provision of advanced data reporting services for their own customers.

Businesses currently use less than 50 per cent of their available data when delivering their product or service offering to their existing and potential client base. Practical solutions using Machine Learning (ML) are becoming common in areas such as online retailing, using the “you may also like” or “other customers also viewed” or “ customers who brought this product also brought” phrases during the provisioning and check out processes.

It won't be a surprise in the near future to see digitally transformed businesses generating much more revenues (and profit) from new digital business models.

For a discussion about expert advice  availability for your business contact paul.humphries@syncly.cloud or call 02037587285