Digital Transformation: How to Future-Proof Your Business Success

By Jason Timm, CloudSmiths CEO

Before 2020, the pivot towards digitalisation took place across industries, although at a very slow pace. Many businesses hesitated to adopt strategic digital transformation, holding onto tried-and-trusted legacy systems. All of this changed after 2020.

The COVID pandemic fast-tracked digital transformation processes in many organisations as businesses were forced to quickly adapt to remote-working models, rapidly evolving customer expectations and ongoing disruptions to the global supply chain. Old legacy systems and processes can no longer cut it in today’s digital-first world.

Digital transformation is no longer an abstract goal to achieve in the future. It is vital for futureproofing your business and making it more resilient to uncertainty.

At a high-level, digital transformation is the strategic integration of digital technologies into key business areas that change how a business operates and delivers value to customers.

The issue that businesses run into when it comes to digital transformation is that it looks different for every business, based on their operations, tools, systems, and existing digital cohesion. However, we can broadly identify a few flagship business areas that are targeted for digital transformation:

Operational efficiency – a large part of digitalisation is improving or updating existing business processes to make them more efficient. This can be through automating manual procedures, creating responsive workflows based on smart data-driven insights or improving end-to-end visibility and collaboration across an entire workforce.

Workforce enablement – Equipping teams and workforces with the data and tools they need to take fast, seamless action without requiring manual validations or data from siloed, disconnected systems. This enables employees to work from anywhere and still access essential data and information in real-time from a single source of truth.

For example, Salesforce’s CRM tool provides real-time customer data updates and buildscustomer profiles based on smart data analysis that employees can access from anywhere.

Digital technology integration – Integrating more digital solutions into everyday business can automate repetitive processes, allowing them to run on autopilot and freeing employees’ time to focus their attention on larger operations.

Integration of technology should benefit a department or organisation as a whole. Ideally it should be an end-to-end solution or at least a solution capable of ‘talking’ to other tech solutions that are being integrated.

Customer experience – Customer expectations and needs have changed. Transformation strategies should reflect this. It is essential to offer multiple forms of customer engagement that reaches a customer on their preferred channel and provides a consistent customer experience across every device. Businesses leverage historical to personalise and contextualise the customer experience for each customer.

Workplace culture and leadership – The pandemic helped many businesses realise the value of offering employees remote and flexible working options. Digital transformation should help build a better workplace culture based on flexibility, trust and convenience that allows employees to have a healthier work-life balance.

Before taking any decisive action, It’s essential to define what digital transformation means for you. What critical areas of your business do you want to improve? What are the short and long-term benefits? These considerations will help you draw up an effective digitaltransformation strategy for your business.