Digital Transformation — Because You Have to Survive

Even though many organisations have embarked on the journey called digital transformation over the last few years, many others are still confused with the essence of it and how to start implementing it. The aim of this post is to get you all the answers you need to lead your way to complete business transformation and to give you real-life examples of what digital transformation looks like.

What is Digital Transformation?

It is the complete transformation of your business, products, processes, and strategies by using most of the latest technologies. In other words, this is the fundamental change in the way you operate and deliver value to your customers and employees by introducing new technologies to meet the constantly changing customer demand.

Why Should I Transform?

Yep, why really? Because whatever you do you have a customer who evolves in time and changes its expectations towards a service, product, and even your digital look & feel. At the same time, introducing more ‘digital’ to your organisation will not only make you look cool and trendy but will also keep you on the competitor’s map, allowing you to address the changing business landscapes and opening the door to much more opportunities.

Where to Start from?

If you agree with all of the above, I would imagine that the next step will be to initiate this process. Well, it is not an easy job and you certainly need someone to support you along the way, showing you the right direction, feeding you with the technology alternatives and how to implement them based on your specific business case.

You are probably thinking right now:

• “How about my company”,
• “What can I transform”?

And the best answer to this is to start pinpointing the things that you cross out of your list on a daily basis such as:

• “Leave this, it has always been like that.”
• “I know that it doesn’t make sense, but that is the way we have been doing it for years.”
• “The website doesn’t need to change. It is brand new, it was built 5 years ago.”
• “Which one of my clients uses a mobile to browse anyway?”

Now is the best time to audit and analyse your current operations that are still done in paper or require a lot of manual work. I would start with your operations’ bottlenecks since first, they are the easiest to identify and secondly, they cost you money and your employees’ morale, which you cannot afford to spare.

I recently came across а nice checklist, created by Prophet. It incorporates the tasks of the three essential elements in the process of digital transformation: leadership, customers, implementation team.

NB!

Don’t do this process on your own. If you haven’t done it so far, this means that you need someone from the outside, that has a good knowledge how to use technology in an effective way and to guide you and stay objective to your current operations and processes.

Digital Transformation in Practice

Once you identify your weak spots (if you can on your own of course), your first step to business transformation is done. Now all you have to do is to select a digital partner to work with to finish up the whole process. I am not going to get into details how to do this, but would rather share with you three cases of digital transformation from our own practice. Maybe you can recognise your case there.

Case Number 1 — Optimising Internal Operations

The Civil Liberties Union for Europe (Liberties) is a nongovernmental organisation with a primary focus on boosting the visibility of human rights at national and European Union levels. And to do so their main daily activity is to create, translate and publish content in several languages.

Back in the days the way to do it was by constantly communicating with one another and manually exchanging articles until they manage to publish the desired content. Building a platform from scratch to handle all those activities saved them time, improved transparency between the different members and allow them to effectively operate.

More details are available here.

Case Number 2 — Building a Brand New Product

Sometimes building a new product from scratch can do the work for you. Instead of handling your operations manually, you replace it with a whole new platform. For example, Livecasts is a product that we have built to serve our clients in an entirely new way.

Before that, our clients recorded their events with a video cam, and the edited version went on YouTube about a week later. With our platform, you can live stream the event and get immediate on-demand availability after the event. That has tremendously changed the way our customers experience this service and has led to many more live streaming opportunities for us.

Case Number 3 — Improving Online Presence

Even though this is not a straight example of digital transformation, it is still an important aspect of turning a digital profile into something much easily accessible and acceptable by the target market. Improving a digital profile can mean a lot of things ranging from rebranding to building a new website or improving social media channels visibility.

Because we specialise in custom design and development, what we can showcase in that area of improvement is our latest two designs for EDC Free Europe and Big Bang Spacetube Festival.

How do you see the digital transformation from your own perspective? Share your experience by sending us an email. We would love to hear from you!